"Drowned," she whispered in his ear; "poor Harry drowned--and I loved him so!" "It may all be some d--d mistake," sighed Sir Madoc, in sore grief and perplexity. "But, O papa," whispered the girl, "I loved him so--loved him as Estelle Cressingham never, never did!" "You, my darling?" "Yes, papa." "My poor pet! I suspected as much all along. Well, well, we are all in the hands of God. It is a black Christmas, this, for us at Craigaderyn, and I shall sorrow for him even as Llywarch Hen sorrowed of old for all the sons he lost in battle. But what a strange fatality to escape so narrowly at the Bôd Mynach, and then to be drowned in the distant East!" And with a heart swollen alike by prayer and sorrow, the girl, whose tender and long-guarded secret had at last escaped her in the shock of grief, sat alone in her room that night, and heard the Christmas chimes ringing out clearly and merrily to all, it seemed, but for her; for those bells, those gladsome bells, which speak to every Christian heart of bright hope here and brighter hope elsewhere, seemed to chime in vain for Winifred Lloyd; so she thought in her innocent heart, "I shall go to him yet, though he can never come back to me!" CHAPTER XLIV.--THE CASTLE OF YALTA. I presume that I need scarcely inform my reader that, notwithstanding the predicament in which a preceding chapter left me, and the tenor of that paragraph which caused such consternation among my warm-hearted Welsh friends at Craigaderyn, I was _not_ drowned in the Black Sea, though my dip in the waters thereof was both a cold and deep one. Such fellows as I, are, perhaps, hard to kill--at least, I hope so. On rising to the surface, I found myself minus forage-cap, sword, and revolver, and also my horse, which, being sorely wounded, floated away out of the creek into which we had fallen (or been hurled by the Cossack lances), and the poor animal was helplessly drowned, without making any attempt to swim landward. This was, perhaps, fortunate for me, as the Cossacks saw it drifting in the moonlight, and continued to fire at it with their carbines, leaving me to scramble quietly ashore unnoticed and unseen.