"Who then?" urged Sybil, her pallor increasing while the silence or pause that ensued was painful to both; to none more than the innocent mother, the guarded secret of whose blameless life was now about to be laid bare before her own child--a secret that seemed now to assume the magnitude of a crime! All the care, doubt, anxiety, and mystery of the past years had gone for nothing, and the sacrifice she had made of herself, was now likely to recoil fearfully upon her, and more than all upon her children. In broken accents, with her aching head reclined on Sybil's breast, she told all that the reader already knows; the insane pride of birth and family which inspired the old lord, his suspicions and threats, the long necessity for consequent secrecy; and Sybil heard all this strange story with intense bewilderment. Could she realise it--take it all into her comprehension? Her mother was a lady of title--her brother Denzil was the real Lord Lamorna, she herself was not a Devereaux, but a Trevelyan like Audley--and he, Audley, who loved her so, was her own cousin! This revelation then explained all to Sybil; all of their wanderings in strange places, and sudden departures from them, when unwelcome tourists who might have recognised Richard Trevelyan came, their secluded life at Porthellick, their marked avoidance of the Trecarrels and others, and on the whole poor Sybil felt cut to the heart, and inspired by not an atom of pride; yet she tenderly and fondly embraced her mother with greater fervour than ever, for more than ever did she feel that she must love her now. "My poor papa drowned--drowned, unburied in the sea--passing away from us without even the name by which we have known and loved him!" exclaimed Sybil. "Oh why is God so cruel to us?" "Alas, Sybil, we can but adore the decrees of Heaven, without seeking to know more of them. This stroke is hard to bear, child--all the harder that I have reason to fear--to dread, oh, my God, that more than your papa's life has perished with him." "More mamma; what can be more?" "That which was dearer to him than life; the succession of Denzil--the honour of us all!" After a long pause, with a vague expression in her eyes, as if her thoughts were travelling back into the years of the past, Sybil said, "I had begun to suspect there was some unpleasant mystery about us." "But affection and delicacy----" "Both, dearest mamma sealed my lips and I was silent; but oh, to what good end or purpose has it all been? By this, too surely is Audley also lost to me." "My poor child, he was your lover, and through me you think you lose him. Oh pardon me, Sybil, darling, for I, your hapless mother, am the cause of all this! Had your papa never seen, or known, or loved me----" "Do not say so, mamma dear," whispered Sybil as her mother's tremulous lips were pressed on her throbbing brow. "It was a plan your papa formed to save his inheritance for you and Denzil, and already his brother claims all."