Before that conversation was half through, Salome had fallen back in her chair in a deadly swoon.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MORNING’S DISCOVERY.

When Miss Levison recovered her consciousness it was broad daylight.  The rising sun glancing over the top of the Eastern mountain sent arrows of golden light in through the window at which she sat.

Music filled the morning air!

Salome passed her hands over her eyes, and gazed around.  So long and deep had been her swoon that, for the time, she had utterly lost her memory, and now found difficulty in trying to recover it.  Bewildered, she looked about, and listened to the strange, wild music sounding under her window—­a sort of morning serenade or reveille, it seemed.

Next her eyes fell upon her magnificent bridal array, displayed on stands near the elegant dressing-table.

Then she remembered that this was her wedding-day, and a flush of joy lighted up her face.

But it passed in a moment.

What was this that lay so heavy at her heart!  Was it the remnant of an evil dream?

What had happened?  Something must have happened!  Else why should she find herself seated in that easy-chair at the open window, and see that her bed had not been occupied?

Then, slowly, she recollected the events of the previous night—­her retirement to her chamber; her talk there with the housekeeper about Rose Cameron, the “handsome hizzie,” who had been haunting the premises and giving trouble all that day; the message from her father; her affecting interview with him in his bedroom; her return to her own apartment through the dimly-lighted, deserted hall, where she met the pale and spectral form of Lord Arondelle, who vanished as she called to him! her terrified flight into her own chamber!

All these incidents she clearly remembered.

Then her excited vigil in the easy-chair, by the open window, and the two voices that broke upon it—­that of her betrothed husband and that of a woman—­of this same Rose Cameron, whose name had been so disreputably connected with Lord Arondelle’s; who then and there claimed to be his wife and was not contradicted!

There! that was the weight that lay so heavy at her heart!

“And yet it must have been a dream!” she said to herself.  Of course she had fallen asleep there in the easy-chair, and with her thoughts running on the apparition she had met in the hall, and on the country people’s gossip about Lord Arondelle and Rose Cameron, she had had that evil dream.  Unquestionably it was only a dream!  Lord Arondelle could never play so base a part as he had seemed to do in her dream!  She reproached herself for having even involuntarily been the subject of it.

And yet! and yet! the weight lay heavy at her heart, and although this was a warm June morning, she shivered as though it had been January.