urdered you? Speak, Constantia,--you are not dead?
I did not murder you--speak! I fired no pistol, and you did not fall!"
The sleep she had so unintentionally broken had been but of short
continuance during those weary hours; and the day was far advanced
before she had leisure to bestow a moment's thought upon the probable
turn that might be given to her future prospects by the sudden summons
of Sir Willmott Burrell to Hampton Court. But, upon whichever side she
turned, her destiny was dark, lowering, and fearful as the
thunder-storm. How her heart fainted when the form of her favourite
Barbara was present to her imagination, as she last held it bleeding on
her bosom! How mysterious was that death! how terrible! She would have
given worlds to look upon her but once more, for she could ill reconcile
the idea of that gentle girl's having a stormy sea-bed at her father's
hands--that rude, unhallowed man, the origin and nature of whose
influence over her own parent she now understood but too well.

Lady Frances Cromwell would have soothed her affliction had she known
how to do so, but comfort cannot be given to a sorrow whose source is
unknown. She entered her friend's watching-room, but could not prevail
upon her to take either repose or food; and hoping to catch the earliest
view of the physician, whose arrival she knew must be soon, she called
one of her women to attend her, and wandered up the hill to Minster,
where the beautiful ruins of Sexburga's nunnery commanded so extensive a
view of the entire island, and a considerable portion of the adjoining
country. The day had risen to one of unclouded beauty; the marshy coast
of Essex was cleared of its hovering fogs; and its green meadows
stretched away in the distance, until they were lost in the clear blue
sky. The southern part of the island, flat and uninteresting as it is,
looked gay and cheerful in the sun-light; for every little lake mirrored
the smiling heavens, and danced in diamond measures to the music of bee
and bird.

The cliffs at East-Church towered away for nearly six miles, broken here
and there by the falling of some venerable crag, hurled, as it were,
into the ocean by the giant hand of changing nature; while, as a
sentinel, the house at Gull's Nest Crag maintained its pre-eminence in
front of the Northern Ocean. The two little islands of Elmley and Harty
slept to the south-east, quietly and silently, like huge rush-nests
floating on the waters. Beyond