“It’s all right!” he whispered, huskily, pantingly.  “It’s all right; they don’t know.  They don’t guess!” Then his manner changed to one of intense alarm and dismay.  “Lost!  Lost!” he gasped.  “I’m ruined, rained!  Herondale has gone, gone—­all is gone!  My poor child—­Ida!”

“Father!” broke from Ida’s white lips.  “Father, I am here.  Look at me, speak to me.  I am here—­everything is not lost.  I am here, and all is well.”

His lips twisted into a smile, a smile of cunning, almost of glee; then he groaned, and the cry rose again: 

“I can’t remember—­all is lost!  Ruined!  My poor child!  Have pity on my child!”

As she clung to him, supporting him as she clung, she felt a shudder run through him, and he fell a lifeless heap upon her shoulder.

The minutes—­were they minutes or years?—­passed, and were broken into fragments by a cry from Jessie.

“Miss Ida!  Miss Ida!  He’s—­the master’s dead!’”

Ida raised her father’s head from her shoulder and looked into his face, and knew that the girl had spoken the truth.

He was dead.  She had lost both father and lover in one day!

CHAPTER XXVI.

Ida sat in the library on the morning of the funeral.  A pelting rain beat upon the windows, over which the blinds had been drawn; the great silence which reigned in the chamber above, in which the dead master of Heron lay, brooded over the whole house, and seemed in no part of it more intense than in this great, book-lined room, in which Godfrey Heron had spent so much of his life.

Ida lay back in the great arm-chair in which he had sat, her small brown hands lying limply in her lap, her eyes fixed absently upon the open book which lay on the table as he had left it.  The pallor of her face, increased by her sorrow, was accentuated by the black dress, almost as plainly made as that which the red-eyed Jessie wore in her kitchen.  Though nearly a week had elapsed since her father had died in her young arms, and notwithstanding her capacity for self-reliance, Ida had not yet recovered from the stupor of the shock.

She was scarcely thinking as she lay back in his chair and looked at the table over which he had bent for so many monotonous years; she scarcely realised that he had passed out of her life, and that she was alone in the world; and she was only vaguely conscious that her sorrow had, so to speak, a double edge; that she had lost not only her father, but the man to whom she had given her heart, the man who should have been standing beside her now, shielding her with his strong arms, comforting her with words of pity and love.  The double blow had fallen so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that the pain of it had been dulled and blunted.  The capacity of human nature for suffering is, after all not unlimited.  God says to physical pain and mental anguish, “Thus far and no farther;” and this limitation saved Ida from utter collapse.