"My next letter will tell you more certainly of my future intentions, and all that immediately concerns myself. Our faithful nurse, Winny Braddon, whose brother perished with papa, has gone to spend--to end, I should say--her days with old Mike Treherne and his wife, who, as you know, is her sister; and the Rector, who takes care of me--for I am all but penniless now--is to give me an introduction to a lady of high rank, who is about to go abroad; to where I know not--to India itself perhaps. Would to Heaven it were! for then we might meet again." "My sister a companion--compelled, for bread, to submit to whim, caprice, neglect, and mortification! Oh, my father, has it come to this!" groaned Denzil in agony of spirit. "The sunlight is setting redly on the rough summits of the Row Tor and Bron Welli. All is quiet--quiet as death around me; I can hear but the beating of my own heart, the most earnest prayers and blessings of which go with these lines across the seas to you, dear Denzil." So ended this letter, which he read many, many times, heedless of the unwonted bustle which reigned in the cantonments, where the gunners were getting additional cannon mounted, the miners forming barricades and traverses, and other vigorous preparations being made for defence in case of a too-probable attack. Denzil had learned that within every shadow, however deep, there may be a darker shade; and now that shade within the shadow that had fallen on him was the death of his mother. His mother dead! Another beloved face gone as his father's had gone--a sweet and winning face he saw in fancy still, yet never should look on again. How much there were of past care and years of love and tenderness to remember now! Then there were his only sister's utter loneliness and helplessness to appal him. How trivial a calamity seemed the coquetry of Rose Trecarrel when compared to sorrows such as these! And she had died the tenant of a humble cottage on the moors--the property of Mike Treherne, the miner, whose son was now a sergeant in his company! And could it be that for months past, while he had been happy, thoughtless, heedless, and full of merriment among his comrades, that she who loved him beyond her own life, purely and unselfishly as only a mother can love an only son, had been in her dark cold grave, and he knew it not? No thought by day, no vision by night, no intuition or thrill of magnetic affinity (such as that of which we read in the Corsican twins and their mother), had told him of this; and yet it was so.