It was a benediction, a farewell, a prayer, in one; all her soul seemed melting and flowing toward him in the wail. All the intense longing of her passionate nature to fly to his protecting arms and tell him all--to tell him that she still loved him as the flowers love the sun, the hart the waterbrook--was expressed in the words; then, as she remembered he could not hear them--that it would avail nothing if he could hear them, her face dropped into her hands, and she shut out the Hall from her hot, burning eyes. She had not yet shed one tear; if she could but have wept, the awful tightening round her brain, the burning fire in her eyes, would have been assuaged; but she could not weep, she was held in thrall, benumbed by the calamity that had befallen her. She, who was to have been Leycester's bride, was now the betrothed of--Jasper Adelstone. And yet, as she stood there, alone in her misery, she knew that were it to be done again she would do it. To keep shame and disgrace from the old man who loved her as a father--the boy who loved her as a brother, she would have laid down her life; but this was more than life. The sacrifice demanded of her, and which she had yielded, was worse than death. Death! She looked up at the blue vault of heaven with aching, longing eyes. If she could but die--die there and then, before Jasper could lay his hand upon her! If she could but die, so that he, Leycester, might come and see her lying cold and white, but still his--his! He would know then that she loved him, that without him she would not accept even life. He would look down at her with the odd light in his dark eyes, perhaps stoop and kiss her--and now he would never kiss her again! How often have blind mortals clamored to the gods for this one boon which they will not yield. When sorrow comes, the cry goes up--"Give us death!" but the gods turn a deaf ear to the prayer. "Live," they say, "the cup is not yet drained; the task is not yet done." And she was young, she thought, with a sigh, "so young, and so strong," she might live for--for years! Oh, the long, dreary vista of years that stretched before her, down which she would drag with tired feet as Jasper Adelstone's wife. No thought of appealing to him, to his mercy, ever occurred to her; she had learned to know him, during that short hour in London, so well as to know that any such appeal would be useless. The sphinx rearing its immovable head above the dreary desert could not be more steadfast, more unyielding than this man who held her in his grasp. "No," she murmured, "I have taken up this burden; I must carry it to the end. Would to Heaven that end were nigh."