She rose with this intention, and, as she moved past her little table, her eye fell upon the letter which the sudden communication by Chayter, respecting her sister and Lester Vane, had caused her to forget.
She turned her eyes hastily around the apartment, Chayter was no longer there. She was alone.
She took up the letter and held it to the lamp, so that she might see the superscription clearly. She started as she recognised the handwriting.
“Heaven! I thought so,” she ejaculated. “It is from Hugh. How thoughtless to address to me here!”
She examined the post-mark, which bore the name of Southampton. She drew a long breath, as though to nerve herself to meet the contents of the letter, which she felt would have a marked influence upon her future destiny, and then she broke the seal.
The contents were penned by a hurried and trembling hand; the very character of the scrawled letters betrayed the workings of a mind convulsed by passion and sorrow--the words themselves only too emphatically proved what the ill-formed characters suggested. She read, with burning eyes, what follows--
“_Helen! thou passionately loved! Measure the intensity of my grief when you learn that my dread forebodings are verified. I sail by the ‘Ripon’ to India on the 4th, three days hence. My agony is insupportable! To be parted from you for years--perhaps never more to meet on earth--drives me to despair--distraction! I could refuse to quit England. I did. An alternative was presented to me; it involved the desolation of one to insure whose happiness my life were too mean a gift; it would have hurled me into beggary, and would still have sundered me from you--from you, Helen, you my life-spring, the font from whence I draw the only joy this world can yield me. What could I do? The chained and manacled slave had more freedom of action than I! My choice lay between this loathed voyage and comparative annihilation, and my consent to leave England has been thus wrung from me. Helen, though but these feeble words greet your tender eyes, yet I am with you face to face, near, near to you in spirit._”
A cold thrill ran through the frame of Helen as she read these words, and she raised her eyes, shrinking and gazing into the misty space before her, as if expecting to see his form, phantom-like and grim, standing there.