Alice rose: she put his hand to her lips, and smiled through her tears:--"I cannot be at this morning's breakfast.--But now--dear, dear, Louis,--best of friends--farewell!"--Her head dropped upon his shoulder, where she struggled with two or three convulsive sobs. He pressed her to his heart, and in vain tried to repel the tears which started to his eyes: they flowed over her face as he supported her trembling steps to the door of her apartment. When he had brought her to the threshold, she uttered a breathless _God bless you_! and breaking from his arms, threw herself into the room. The door was closed:--he heard her sob:--but tearing himself away, he returned with a heavy load at his heart to his own chamber. CHAP. X. The silver gleams of a winter morning streaked the horizon, as the chaise which conveyed Louis de Montemar from the friends of his youth, mounted the heights of Warkworth, and gave him a last glimpse of Morewick-hall, lying in its shroud of mist at the bottom of the valley. The smoke of his uncle's chimney, beside which he had just received that venerable man's parting embrace and blessing, was mingling its dark volumes with the ascending vapours. A bleak and gusty wind tossed their white billows around the ancient pinnacles of the building; but no smoke arose from any other chimney!--; There was no opened window-shutter; no sign of any other of the dear inhabitants being awake. The good old man was then weeping alone, and mingling with his tears, the earnest prayer of solicitude for the preservation of his beloved nephew! "And the prayer of the righteous availeth much!" said Louis to himself, fixing his eye on the golden disk just peeping above the distant rim of the ocean: "lovers have preserved their constancy, by a promise that each would remember the other when the sun set or rose! Why shall I not preserve my constancy to a better love than that of woman, whenever I look on yon rising or setting orb, and remember, that at those hours my venerable uncle is on his knees to Heaven for the conservation of my soul?"