Charles staggered back a pace or two until he came to the table, at which he clutched for support.  He turned very pale as he said, in a faint voice,—­

“Is—­is she mad, or am I?”

“Tell him I am mad, Henry,” cried Flora.  “Do not, oh, do not make his lonely thoughts terrible with more than that.  Tell him I am mad.”

“Come with me,” whispered Henry to Holland.  “I pray you come with me at once, and you shall know all.”

“I—­will.”

“George, stay with Flora for a time.  Come, come, Mr. Holland, you ought, and you shall know all; then you can come to a judgment for yourself.  This way, sir.  You cannot, in the wildest freak of your imagination, guess that which I have now to tell you.”

Never was mortal man so utterly bewildered by the events of the last hour of his existence as was now Charles Holland, and truly he might well be so.  He had arrived in England, and made what speed he could to the house of a family whom he admired for their intelligence, their high culture, and in one member of which his whole thoughts of domestic happiness in this world were centered, and he found nothing but confusion, incoherence, mystery, and the wildest dismay.

Well might he doubt if he were sleeping or waking—­well might he ask if he or they were mad.

And now, as, after a long, lingering look of affection upon the pale, suffering face of Flora, he followed Henry from the room, his thoughts were busy in fancying a thousand vague and wild imaginations with respect to the communication which was promised to be made to him.

But, as Henry had truly said to him, not in the wildest freak of his imagination could he conceive of any thing near the terrible strangeness and horror of that which he had to tell him, and consequently he found himself closeted with Henry in a small private room, removed from the domestic part of the hall, to the full in as bewildered a state as he had been from the first.

CHAPTER XI.

The communications to the lover.—­The heart’s despair.

[Illustration]

Consternation is sympathetic, and any one who had looked upon the features of Charles Holland, now that he was seated with Henry Bannerworth, in expectation of a communication which his fears told him was to blast all his dearest and most fondly cherished hopes for ever, would scarce have recognised in him the same young man who, one short hour before, had knocked so loudly, and so full of joyful hope and expectation, at the door of the hall.

But so it was.  He knew Henry Bannerworth too well to suppose that any unreal cause could blanch his cheek.  He knew Flora too well to imagine for one moment that caprice had dictated the, to him, fearful words of dismissal she had uttered to him.

Happier would it at that time have been for Charles Holland had she acted capriciously towards him, and convinced him that his true heart’s devotion had been cast at the feet of one unworthy of so really noble a gift.  Pride would then have enabled him, no doubt, successfully to resist the blow.  A feeling of honest and proper indignation at having his feelings trifled with, would, no doubt, have sustained him, but, alas! the case seemed widely different.