said you were not there, for that sun was you; but
suddenly the winds ceased, and the rain came on fast and heavy: so my
romance cooled, and my fever slacked; I thought on the inn at Ens,
and the blessings of a wood fire, which is lighted in a moment, and I
spurred on my horse accordingly."

"It is very strange," said Isabel.

"What, love?" whispered Algernon, kissing her cheek.

"Nothing, dearest, nothing."

At that instant, the deer, which lay waving their lordly antlers to and
fro beneath the avenue which sloped upward from the stream to the house,
rose hurriedly and in confusion, and stood gazing, with watchful eyes,
upon a man advancing towards the pair.

It was one of the servants with a letter. Isabel saw a faint change
(which none else could have seen) in Mordaunt's countenance, as he
recognized the writing and broke the seal. When he had read the letter,
his eyes fell upon the ground, and then, with a slight start, he lifted
them up, and gazed long and eagerly around. Wistfully did he drink,
as it were, into his heart the beautiful and expanded scene which lay
stretched on either side; the noble avenue which his forefathers had
planted as a shelter to their sons, and which now in its majestic growth
and its waving boughs seemed to say, "Lo! ye are repaid!" and the never
silent and silver stream, by which his boyhood had sat for hours, lulled
by its music, and inhaling the fragrance of the reed and wild flower
that decoyed the bee to its glossy banks; and the deer, to whose
melancholy belling be had listened so often in the gray twilight with
a rapt and dreaming ear; and the green fern waving on the gentle hill,
from whose shade his young feet had startled the hare and the infant
fawn; and far and faintly gleaming through the thick trees, which
clasped it as with a girdle, the old Hall, so associated with vague
hopes and musing dreams, and the dim legends of gone time, and the lofty
prejudices of ancestral pride,--all seemed to sink within him, as he
gazed, like the last looks of departing friends; and when Isabel, who
had not dared to break a silence which partook so strongly of gloom,
at length laid her hand upon his arm, and lifted her dark, deep, tender
eyes to his, he said, as he drew her towards him, and a faint and sickly
smile played upon his lips,--

"It is past, Isabel: henceforth we have no wealth but in each other. The
cause has been decided--and--and--we are beggars!"

CHAPTER XXIX.