'
On a short consideration with him, she agreed to wait at the top of
the tower till he could come back and inform her if the accident
were really so serious as to interfere with his plan for departure.
He then left her, and there she sat in the dark, alone, looking over
the parapet, and straining her eyes in the direction of the
homestead.
At first all was obscurity; but when he had been gone about ten
minutes lights began to move to and fro in the hollow where the
house stood, and shouts occasionally mingled with the wind, which
retained some violence yet, playing over the trees beneath her as on
the strings of a lyre. But not a bough of them was visible, a cloak
of blackness covering everything netherward; while overhead the
windy sky looked down with a strange and disguised face, the three
or four stars that alone were visible being so dissociated by clouds
that she knew not which they were. Under any other circumstances
Lady Constantine might have felt a nameless fear in thus sitting
aloft on a lonely column, with a forest groaning under her feet, and
palaeolithic dead men feeding its roots; but the recent passionate
decision stirred her pulses to an intensity beside which the
ordinary tremors of feminine existence asserted themselves in vain.
The apocalyptic effect of the scene surrounding her was, indeed, not
inharmonious, and afforded an appropriate background to her
intentions.
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