Then came to Mr. Eyrle a remembrance of lines that had once haunted him: Never, believe me, appear the immortals, Never alone. They ran through his mind until they reached Aldenmere, where sorrow in darkest guise awaited them. CHAPTER L. THE VOW KEPT. Lady Hermione Alden sat in her room alone. Her children had been in with their pretty morning greetings, and had, for the first time, hurried from her, scared by the sight of that pale, stricken, haggard face. “They say there is mercy in heaven,” she moaned. “Will that mercy be shown to me?” The few hours that had passed over her head seemed like so many years. “Was it only yesterday morning,” she asked herself, “that I was laughing, a child among my children, and now I am stricken with grief as with years? Oh! if I could only fly to Ronald and bid him be silent until I am dead. I remember my vow; every word of it burned in on my heart, and I fulfill it, even as Jephtha did his. Let it cost me my life--what is life?--only the breath of the body; the better part of me can never die.” Then something seemed to plead in her heart for her children, so young, so tender. “Better the stain on my name than on his,” she said. “People will say I am jealous and mad; much is pardoned in a jealous woman.” Aldenmere was looking more beautiful than ever that morning. The brightest sun shone over it, the trees wore their green dress, the birds filled the air with song, the flowers were all luscious bloom and fragrance, the fountains rippled merrily in the sunlight; yet the mistress of all this splendor sat in a darkened room, where neither sunlight nor fragrance could reach her. “I must read it again,” she said, rising from the chair. “I must read it, though every word stabs me, though every word burns its way into my brain and leaves a pain there. I must read it, even as men gaze curiously upon the sword that is to slay them; and then, when it is once more read, I will destroy it. There shall be no more written evidence of what was a cruel wrong.” She went to a drawer and unlocked it. She took from it the same small parcel that had lain in the secret drawer of the box, and, as she did so a pallor, ghastly and awful to see, came over her face. The same strange, faint fluttering at her heart that had seized her before came again, and this time it strangled the breath on her lips. She gasped for breath and could not find it; her lips grew rigid, her hands cold, then her heart gave one sudden bound and the breath came back in fluttering sighs. She sat down. Not just yet had she strength to open the fatal parcel. She bowed her head down upon it and sat silent, motionless as the dead. She raised her beautiful, colorless face when a servant rapped at the door and announced: “Lord Lorriston and Mr. Eyrle.”