"It was a false plan, and see how it may fail us--nay already, to all appearance has failed us." "He is in his grave--if indeed the ocean can be called a grave." "True, my darling papa--and I must not upbraid him, even in thought." "If it is the will of God that I should suffer, His will be done! But my children--my children!" cried the widow wildly, and she raised her hands and her dark and beautiful but bloodshot eyes to Heaven; "my brave and handsome Denzil, and my soft sweet Sybil, of what have they been guilty, that shame and ruin, should fall on them?" "Mamma," whispered Sybil, embracing her closely, "we must learn to bear with resignation the woes we cannot help. But oh," added the girl in her heart, "how am I to write to Denzil of all this sorrow, and probably worse than sorrow and poverty?" CHAPTER XX. A FAMILY GROUP. And so he was gone--this tender husband, who had loved her so dearly, and whose secret she had shared so unavailingly for years; and apart from the horror of the doubt that hung over the future of her children, whose means and honour, like her own, had too probably perished with him, a despair grew in the heart of Constance when she surveyed the familiar objects, the little household gods of their once happy home, and thought upon the days that could never, never come again. There were times when she could not believe that she had lost him; that her sorrow was a painful dream from which she must awake. She perpetually found herself softly whispering his name, especially in the waking hours of the night. Thus too, from overtension of the nervous system, she would start at the fancied sound of her own name, uttered as if by his voice at a vast distance. In the delicacy and tenderness of Constance, there was an amount of keenness and intensity possessed by few, and thus her heart bled for her daughter, rather than for her own dubious position, the fact of which had been so coarsely thrust upon her by the insolent letter of Downie Trevelyan, who was now formally spoken of and everywhere announced and received as "Lord Lamorna." That Sybil had given all the wealth of her young heart to this man's son, was but too evident to her anxious mother's observation; but how would matters tend now, and could that misplaced love have a successful termination? Days were passing in sorrow now; no letters from Audley came to either. Sybil looked delicate and grew pale and thin, for a double grief was consuming her, and Constance began to marvel in her heart, was she meant to live in suffering and penury, perhaps to die early, this child--her dead father's idol, so loved and petted by him.