“Have I lost your confidence?  Am I no longer loved?” said the Lady Ellinor.  “Can you sit heart-broken there, and will not allow me to comfort you?  Still no answer!  Shall I go?  Shall I leave you, my love?  Do you wish me absent?” continued she in a trembling voice, the tears flowing over her face, as she rose up.  Her motion to depart aroused the Lady Anne.  “Ellinor! my Ellinor!” she cried, and throwing herself forward, she stretched forth her arms.  In another moment she was weeping on the bosom of her friend.  She wept for a long time without restraint, for the Lady Ellinor said nothing, but drew her nearer and nearer to her bosom, and tenderly pressed the hand that was clasped in hers.

“I ought not to be weeping here,” at length she said, “I ought to let you leave me, but I have not the courage, I cannot bear to lose your friendship,—­your affection, my Ellinor!  Can you love me?  Have you loved me, knowing all the while, as every one must?  To-day—­this very hour, since you left me, I learned:—­no I cannot tell you!  Look on that page, Ellinor, you will see why you find me thus.  I am the most wretched, wretched creature!”—­here again she burst into an agony of uncontrollable grief.

* * * * *

Who can describe the feelings of the Lady Anne—­alone, in her chamber, looking up at the portrait of her mother, upon which she had so often gazed with delight and reverence!  “Is it possible?” said she to herself, “can this be she, of whom I have read such dreadful things?  Have all my young and happy days been but a dream, from which I wake at last?  Is not this dreadful certainty still as a hideous dream to me?”

She had another cause of bitter grief.  She loved the young and noble-minded Lord Russell, the Earl of Bedford’s eldest son; and she had heard him vow affection and faithfulness to her.  She now perceived at once the reasons why the Earl of Bedford had objected to their marriage:  she almost wondered within herself that the Lord Russel should have chosen her; and though she loved him more for avowing his attachment, though her heart pleaded warmly for him, she determined to renounce his plighted love.  “It must be done,” she said, “and better now;—­delay will but bring weakness. Now I can write—­I feel that I have strength.”  And the Lady Anne wrote, and folded with a trembling hand the letter which should give up her life’s happiness; and fearing her resolution might not hold, she despatched it by a messenger, as the Lord Russel was then in the neighbourhood; and returned mournfully to her own chamber.  She opened an old volume which lay upon her toilette—­a volume to which she turned in time of trouble, to seek that peace which the world cannot give.

Lady Ellinor soon aroused her by the tidings that a messenger had arrived with a letter from her father, and she descended in search of him.