She ceases.  According to the terms of the treaty, the venerable lady’s time has passed.  An extinguisher descends on her, giving her the likeness of one under condemnation of ’the Most Holy Inqusition, in the ranks of an ‘auto da fe’; and singularly resembling that victim at the first sharp bite of the flames she will, be when she hears the version of her story.

CHAPTER IV

MORNING AND FAREWELL TO AN OLD HOME

Brother and sister were about to leave the mountainland for England.  They had not gone to bed overnight, and from the windows of their deserted home, a little before dawn, they saw the dwindled moon, a late riser, break through droves of hunted cloud, directly topping their ancient guardian height, the triple peak and giant of the range, friendlier in his name than in aspect for the two young people clinging to the scene they were to quit.  His name recalled old-days:  the apparition of his head among the heavens drummed on their sense of banishment.

To the girl, this was a division of her life, and the dawn held the sword.  She felt herself midswing across a gulf that was the grave of one half, without a light of promise for the other.  Her passionate excess of attachment to her buried home robbed the future of any colours it might have worn to bid a young heart quicken.  And England, though she was of British blood, was a foreign place to her, not alluring:  her brother had twice come out of England reserved in speech; her mother’s talk of England had been unhappy; her father had suffered ill-treatment there from a brutal institution termed the Admiralty, and had never regretted the not seeing England again.  The thought that she was bound thitherward enfolded her like a frosty mist.  But these bare walls, these loud floors, chill rooms, dull windows, and the vault-sounding of the ghostly house, everywhere the absence of the faces in the house told her she had no choice, she must go.  The appearance of her old friend the towering mountain-height, up a blue night-sky, compelled her swift mind to see herself far away, yearning to him out of exile, an exile that had no local features; she would not imagine them to give a centre of warmth, her wilful grief preferred the blank.  It resembled death in seeming some hollowness behind a shroud, which we shudder at.

The room was lighted by a stable-lantern on a kitchen-table.  Their seat near the window was a rickety garden-bench rejected in the headlong sale of the furniture; and when she rose, unable to continue motionless while the hosts of illuminated cloud flew fast, she had to warn her brother to preserve his balance.  He tacitly did so, aware of the necessity.