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.
"Mamma! mamma! mamma!"
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.
"My child! my child!"
"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.
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