Violante sate down, mechanically. She felt as if stunned by a mortal blow. She closed her eyes, and breathed hard. A deadly faintness seized her; and when it passed away, it seemed to her as if she were no longer the same being, nor the world around her the same world—as if she were but one sense of intense, hopeless misery, and as if the universe were but one inanimate void. So strangely immaterial are we really—we human beings, with flesh and blood—that if you suddenly abstract from us but a single, impalpable, airy thought, which our souls have cherished, you seem to curdle the air, to extinguish the sun, to snap every link that connects us to matter, and to benumb everything into death, except woe. And this warm, young, southern nature, but a moment before was so full of joy and life, and vigorous, lofty hope. It never till now had known its own intensity and depth. The virgin had never lifted the veil from her own soul of woman. What, till then, had Harley L’Estrange been to Violante? An ideal—a dream of some imagined excellence—a type of poetry in the midst of the common world. It had not been Harley the Man—it had been Harley the Phantom. She had never said to herself, “He is identified with my love, my hopes, my home, my future.” How could she? Of such, he himself had never spoken; an internal voice, indeed, had vaguely, yet irresistibly, whispered to her that, despite his light words, his feelings towards her were grave and deep. O false voice! how it had deceived her. Her quick convictions seized the all that Helen had left unsaid. And now suddenly she felt what it is to love, and what it is to despair. So she sate, crushed and solitary, neither murmuring nor weeping, only now and then passing her hand across her brow, as if to clear away some cloud that would not be dispersed; or heaving a deep sigh, as if to throw off some load that no time henceforth could remove. There are certain moments in life in which we say to ourselves, “All is over; no matter what else changes, that which I have made my all is gone evermore—evermore.” And our own thought rings back in our ears, “Evermore—evermore!” CHAPTER VIII. As Violante thus sate, a stranger, passing stealthily through the trees, stood between herself and the evening sun. She saw him not. He paused a moment, and then spoke low, in her native tongue, addressing her by the name which she had borne in Italy. He spoke as a relation, and excused his intrusion: “For,” said he, “I come to suggest to the daughter the means by which she can restore to her father his country and his honours.” At the word “father” Violante roused herself, and all her love for that father rushed back upon her with double force. It does so ever—we love most our parents at the moment when some tie less holy is abruptly broken; and when the conscience says, “_There_, at least, is a love that never has deceived thee!”