At last the Earl finished examining the papers. He put them down feebly, and sat staring blankly at vacancy. He looked ten years older than when he had entered the dining-room. His face was as bloodless as the face of a corpse, his lips were ashen, and new furrows seemed to have been traced on his brow. On his face there was stamped a fixed and settled expression of dull, changeless anguish, which smote Zillah to her heart. He did not see her--he did not notice that other face, as pallid as his own, which was turned toward his, with an agony in its expression which rivaled all that he was enduring. No--he noticed nothing, and saw no one. All his soul was taken up now with one thought. He had read the paper, and had at once accepted its terrific meaning. To him it had declared that in the tragedy of his young life, not only his wife had been false, but his friend also. More--that it was his friend who had betrayed his wife. More yet--and there was fresh anguish in this thought--this friend, after the absence of many years, had returned and claimed his friendship, and had received his confidences. To him he had poured out the grief of his heart--the confession of life-long sorrows which had been wrought by the very man to whom he told his tale. And this was the man who, under the plea of ancient friendship, had bought his son for gold! Great Heaven! the son of the woman whom he had ruined--and for gold! He had drawn away his wife to ruin--he had come and drawn away his son--into what? into a marriage with the daughter of his own mother's betrayer. Such were the thoughts, mad, frenzied, that filled Lord Chetwynde's mind as he sat there stunned--paralyzed by this hideous accumulation of intolerable griefs. What was Zillah to him now? The child of a foul traitor. The one to whom his noble son had been sold. That son had been, as he once said, the solace of his life. For his sake he had been content to live even under his load of shame and misery. For him he had labored; for his happiness he had planned. And for what? What? That which was too hideous to think of--a living death--a union with one from whom he ought to stand apart for evermore. Little did Zillah know what thoughts were sweeping and surging through the mind of Lord Chetwynde as she sat there watching him with her awful eyes. Little did she dream of the feelings with which, at that moment, he regarded her. Nothing of this kind came to her. One only thought was present--the anguish which he was enduring. The sight of that anguish was intolerable. She looked, and waited, and at last, unable to bear this any longer, she sprang forward, and tore his hands away from his face. "It's not! It's not!" she gasped. "Say you do not believe it! Oh, father! It's impossible!" The Earl withdrew his hands, and shrank away from her, regarding her with that blank gaze which shows that the mind sees not the material form toward which the eyes are turned, but is taken up with its own thoughts.