As for poor Bella Bruce, a dove's bosom is no more fit to rebuff a poisoned arrow than she was to combat that foulest and direst of all a miscreant's weapons, an anonymous letter. She, in her goodness and innocence, never dreamed that any person she did not know could possibly tell a lie to wound her. The letter fell on her like a cruel revelation from heaven.
The blow was so savage that, at first, it stunned her.
She sat pale and stupefied; but beneath the stupor were the rising throbs of coming agonies.
After that horrible stupor her anguish grew and grew, till it found vent in a miserable cry, rising, and rising, and rising, in agony.
Yes; her mother had been dead these three years, and her father sat in the next room; yet, in her anguish, she cried to her mother--a cry the which, if your mother had heard, she would have expected Bella's to come to her even from the grave.
Admiral Bruce heard this fearful cry--the living calling on the dead--and burst through the folding-doors in a moment, white as a ghost.
He found his daughter writhing on the sofa, ghastly, and grinding in her hand the cursed paper that had poisoned her young life.
“Oh, papa! see! see!” And she tried to open the letter for him, but her hands trembled so she could not.
He kneeled down by her side, the stout old warrior, and read the letter, while she clung to him, moaning now, and quivering all over from head to foot.
“Why, there's no signature! The writer is a coward and, perhaps, a liar. Stop! he offers a test. I'll put him to it this minute.”
He laid the moaning girl on the sofa, ordered his servants to admit nobody into the house, and drove at once to Mayfair.
He called at Miss Somerset's house, saw Polly, and questioned her.
He drove home again, and came into the drawing-room looking as he had been seen to look when fighting his ship; but his daughter had never seen him so. “My girl,” said he, solemnly, “there's nothing for you to do but to be brave, and hide your grief as well as you can, for the man is unworthy of your love. That coward spoke the truth. He is there at this moment.”
“Oh, papa! papa! let me die! The world is too wicked for me. Let me die!”
“Die for an unworthy object? For shame! Go to your own room, my girl, and pray to your God to help you, since your mother has left us. Oh, how I miss her now! Go and pray, and let no one else know what we suffer. Be your father's daughter. Fight and pray.”