"I do verily so believe, sweetheart," he answered earnestly, "and so I pray you dwell no more on so terrible a moment of your life, and think only of His mercy in calling you back from so untimely a grave, and of His sympathy with our human love, in suffering me thus mysteriously to be His instrument in saving you! Yet I cannot fully understand such utter woe as the gipsy's tale brought upon you. Could not the thought of my sheltering love, so soon to be wholly bestowed on you, chase away the terrors which her horrible words, and, I doubt not, equally horrible appearance, caused your tender heart to suffer? Could you not rest assured that your mother's care and love for you had doubtless undone the curse for ever, and that our home would be the sweet foundation of a new life and happiness, in which all the shame and suffering endured by your forefathers should be utterly forgotten? Did you lose all faith, dear heart, in your faithful physician, and the happy assurance he had given us of the blessed life, humanly speaking, before us?" "His human speech has erred, beloved," answered Primrose in a low trembling voice, "and his human knowledge has failed, being, alas, too weak for so great extremity! Till I knew the nature of the curse I believed most truly that in our dear Rhiwallon's skilful hand lay a power which had not in vain laid your own and my mother's fears to rest, and that the vague disquieting shadows of my girlhood--long since, until recalled in horrid vividness by the gipsy's words, forgotten in the joy of my love for you--were indeed, as she assured me, but the faint reflection of her own sad sufferings. And you--oh, Percival!--you, as well as my poor mother, both knowing well the nature of the curse, believed it too! I know you did in your most secret heart feel all your fears dispelled wholly and for ever--those fears which have traced these lines on your dear face, Percival, at which I have of late oft secretly wondered, till now I see their just cause!--or ne'er would you have spoken to me a year since those sweet words which have given me such bliss unutterable that I have forgotten aught else! But Percival, my beloved!--oh, God help me, for I know not how to speak the words which must give him such bitter pain!--you did not know, nor did my poor mother realise that in her whom you loved the curse you believed dead still lived; that her childish happiness and girlhood's joy had been from time to time darkened by a strange and secret shadow, haunting her with nameless terrors and vague, unknown temptation, until, two years since, in your pure presence, it fled away, as she thought, for ever, and all recollection of it was swallowed up in the sunlight of her great love for you. Oh, Percival, had she but known for one moment only, as she now knows, the true meaning of that mysterious shadow, she would have fled for ever from your presence, ere she suffered you to pour upon