Till then I did not know the cruelty and
jealousy of man's nature. The next morning when
I thought to take up again our broken thread
of confidence, I found that Godfrey—my brother,
in whom all my plans and hopes had centred all
my life long, until this later and very different
tie had been formed between James Saville and
me; whom I loved no less because I loved
another, nay, whom I loved more tenderly while
this shadow of a separation was passing over
us—had deserted me, had banished himself from
his only remaining sanctuary of affection.
Godfrey was gone, leaving a few poignant words of
accusation, which charged me with wilfully
deceiving him by the concealment of Daisy's
infidelity, and my own betrothal.

Every effort of ours to track out my brother
was fruitless; and after the lapse of some months
I was married to James Saville, being alone with
no one of my blood and kindred beside me,
while he gathered me into the circle of his
family. The autumn exhibitions were open in
London, and to them he took his artist wife.
Looking eagerly through the catalogue of the
British Institution, I found the name I wanted,
Godfrey Lincoln, the exhibition of two pictures
that were praised highly; but the address
appended to the name was that of a picture agent,
and when I applied to him he could give me no
information about my brother, except that his
paintings were already sold at a high price.

Afterwards, for years, I frequented every
gallery of pictures where Godfrey exhibited,
reading in his works a record of his wanderings.
Sometimes he was in Norway, among wild,
tempest-scarred rocks, and storm-swept fjords;
at others, in desert and volcanic Iceland; and
again upon the pointed sierras of Spain. No
eye saw the story in them, which made them
pathetic to me; no one fathomed the deep
melancholy of those stormy seas, and gloomy skies,
and desolate mountains; no one detected, as I
did, in scarcely perceptible under-tints,
sometimes in the transparent texture of a cloud, in
the crest of a wave, in the ripple of an inland
lake, or in the profile of a mountain, the delicate
lines of a woman's face, which seemed to haunt
the artist's soul, and blend itself with every
work of his imagination. Whether Godfrey
knew it or not, there was always in some
passage of his landscapes a shadowy, undefined
suggestion of Daisy's features, though he never
introduced a woman's form into one of them.
This was all I could learn of my brother, save
that from time to time he sent me munificent
gifts of money, to repay, he said, my toils and
privations for his sake in past years. Ah! This
was not the compensation I looked forward to,
when I laboured heartily for him at my poor,
little, insignificant, water-colour sketches.

Daisy's father died poor, and was therefore
soon forgotten in his town; and her memory
was almost lost to every one but me, until the
mutiny in India awoke a feeling of personal
interest in our fair young townswoman, now
recollected with something of anxiety by her
former schoolfellows and old admirers. Vague
reports were circulated now and then; rumours
of awful massacre in which she was a victim,
and of solitary death in the jungle; but the
mutiny raged on, and we had no definite intelligence
of her, and my resentment fading before
the terrible peril of her position in that continent
of bloodshed, I thought and prayed for Daisy as
if she had been my sister.

So many years passed, that my children were
making me forget the time when I was Emma
Lincoln; though I talked to them often of their
uncle Godfrey, and called one of my boys by his
name; when I went, as was my custom, to an
exhibition in Liverpool, where I could find again
a clue to his recent life. His picture, well hung
in a good light, arrested my eye in a moment;
for before me I saw the peaked crag of Elmeth,
our native bill, with the golden-green slopes of
Wodenhill behind, darkening under the livid
hues of a gathering thunder-cloud, just as we
had often watched it in our childhood, holding
tightly hand in hand, and bidding one another
in frightened whispers not to be afraid. I
gazed with my heart; and becoming a child
again, wept childishly before my brother's
picture of our birthplace.

I was yet standing there, with my veil drawn
down to hide my tears, when a voice very low,
and weak, and tremulous, addressed to me a
question about the painting I seemed to
scrutinise so closely. It was the shy and timid
utterance I used to love in Daisy; and I saw
that none other but Daisy herself, with sunken
eyes where there dwelt a time-worn look of fear,
and lips that trembled, and hands that grasped
each other nervously, stood beside me,
recognising—not me, but the work of Godfrey, whom
she had betrayed.

I took Daisy home to my lodgings, and heard
her story; one that was but a repetition of the
horrors I had read shudderingly, and which I
had read only for her sake. Enough that she
was come back to England a widow, with but
one child remaining of the three that had been
born to her. She was poor, moreover, having
no other provision than the pension allotted to
her; and when I resumed my old authority over
her, and bade her come home with me to my
family, she resigned herself to my guidance
with the implicit dependence of her girlhood.

Therefore, seeking Godfrey, I have brought
Daisy here, under the crag of Elmeth, which is
engulfed in mist and clouds. She does not
know, this fragile, broken-hearted, hopeless
woman, that she is lying, dreaming dreams of the
Indian perils, at the very foot of the hill where
Godfrey has fixed his solitary home, and dwells
apart, crushing down his best and happiest
nature. To-morrow, when the sun looks over
the brow of Wodenhill, a new life dawns for both.

It was an October morning when Daisy and I
quitted the quiet village street, carpeted with
almost untrodden leaves, and went slowly up
the cart-road leading over the table-land to the
other mountain villages; a road that was only
a narrow ledge cut into the steep hill-side, with