From the tenour of that horrible interview at Rhoscadzhel, where every word that passed seemed as if burned into her heart with letters of fire, Sybil felt a sure conviction that all must and should be at an end between herself and Audley Trevelyan. The treatment of her mother, of her absent brother's claims, of her own, and of her dead father's memory, his will and wishes, all required this sacrifice at her hands; so resolutely and calmly--though a few tears rolled silently down her cheek the while--she drew his diamond ring from her "engaged" finger--an engaged one now no longer--and making it up in a packet, together with a few letters he had written to her, she despatched it, addressed by her own trembling hand, and without a word of comment, to Rhoscadzhel; and this packet it was which we have just seen Jasper Funnel place in the hands of his excited young master. Her mother's embraces, tenderness, and kisses were her sole but best reward for acting thus; yet poor Sybil seemed the very impersonation of beauty, grief, and girlhood bordering on womanhood. The buoyancy of the former was gone; a change had come over her soft and once bright face, which wore a sad and settled expression now. It was that white woe which someone styles "the deepest mourning features can put on." Her pencil and her piano, each so much the solace of her lonely hours, were, of course, relinquished now; and it seemed as if she should never take to them again. She looked ill, and appeared to be pining: but, sooth to say, it was less the loss of Audley than her mother's grief that affected her. The doctor, when summoned, pocketed his guinea, but did nothing more; so Winny Braddon urged Constance, but in vain, that "their poor chealveen" should be taken to the nearest _Mean-tol_ (or Holed Stone) so that she might try the sovereign old Cornish cure for all mysterious ailments, by creeping through the orifice thereof; for in the ancient duchy, as in some parts of Ireland and the remote Scottish Isles, where such natural or artificial perforations were used of old by the Druids to initiate and dedicate their children to the offices of rock-worship, they are still regarded with superstition, as possessing the gift of effecting miraculous cures. Constance, too, was ill, and in the excess of her grief and lowness of heart, she fancied herself worse than she really was; and ever present was the thought, how perilous the lonely path of life would be to a girl so beautiful as Sybil, if she--her mother--were taken away by the hand of death before another and fitting protector were provided. Morbid at times by sorrow, this reflection made the breast of Constance a prey to the most craving and clamorous anxiety.