No subsequent letter arrived from Gerard. Lady Cecil wondered and conjectured, and expected impatiently. She and her friend could talk of nothing else. The strange fact that a traveller from America proclaimed that he had tidings of the lost one, offered a fertile field for suppositions. Had Mrs. Neville been carried across the Atlantic? How impossible was this, against her own consent! No pirate's bark was there, with a crew experienced in crime, ready to acquiesce in a deed of violence; no fortalice existed, in whose impenetrable walls she could have been immured; yet so much of strange and fearful must belong to her fate, which the imagination mourned to think of! Love, though in these days it carries on its tragedies more covertly--and kills by the slow, untold pang--by the worm in the bosom--and exerts its influence rather by teaching deceit than instigating to acts of violence, yet love reigns in the hearts of men as tyrannically and fiercely--and causes as much evil, as much ruin, and as many tears, as when, in the younger world, hecatombs were slain in his honour. In former days mortals wasted rather life than feeling, and every blow was a physical one; now the heart dies, though the body lives--and a miserable existence is dragged out, after hope and joy have ceased to adorn it; yet love is still, despite the schoolmaster and the legislator, the prime law of human life, and Alithea Neville was well fitted to inspire an ardent passion. She had a sensibility which, while it gave strength to her affections, yet diffused a certain weakness over the mechanism of her being, that made those around her tremble; she had genius which added lustre to her eye, and shed around her a fascination of manner, which no man could witness without desiring to dedicate himself to her service. She seemed the very object whom Sheridan addressed when he said-- "For friends in every age you'll meet, And lovers in the young." That she should be loved to desperation could excite no wonder--but what had been the effects of this love? a distant home across the ocean--a home of privation and sorrow--the yearning for her lost children--the slow breaking of the contrite heart; a life dragged on despite the pangs of memory--or a nameless grave. Such were the conjectures caused by the letter of the American. At length Neville returned. Each turned her eye on his face, to read the intelligence he had acquired in his speaking countenance. It was sad. "She lives and is lost," thought Lady Cecil; "He mourns her dead!" was the supposition of the single-minded Elizabeth. At first he avoided the subject of his inquiry, and his companions did not question him; till at last he suddenly exclaimed, "Do you not wish to learn something, Sophia? Have you forgotten the object of my journey?" "Dear Gerard," replied Lady Cecil, "these walls and woods, had they a voice, could tell you that we have thought and spoken of nothing else." "She is dead!" he answered, abruptly.