Lionel held her to his side, his arm round her.  She trembled still—­trembled excessively; her bosom heaved and fell beneath his hand.

“When I die, it will be in a thunder-storm,” she whispered.

“You foolish girl!” he said, his tone half a joking one, wholly tender.  “What can have given you this excessive fear of thunder, Sibylla?”

“I was always frightened at a thunder-storm.  Deborah says mamma was.  But I was not so very frightened until a storm I witnessed in Australia.  It killed a man!” she added, shivering and nestling nearer to Lionel.

“Ah!”

“It was only a few days before Frederick left me, when he and Captain Cannonby went away together,” she continued.  “We had hired a carriage, and had gone out of the town ever so far.  There was something to be seen there; I forget what now; races perhaps.  I know a good many people went; and an awful thunder-storm came on.  Some ran under the trees for shelter; some would not; and the lightning killed a man.  Oh, Lionel, I shall never forget it!  I saw him carried past; I saw his face!  Since then I have felt ready to die myself with the fear.”

She turned her face, and hid it upon his bosom.  Lionel did not attempt to soothe the fear; he knew that for such fear time alone is the only cure.  He whispered words of soothing to her; he stroked fondly her golden hair.  In these moments, when she was gentle, yielding, clinging to him for protection, three parts of his old love for her would come back again.  The lamp, which had been turned on to its full blaze of light, was behind them, so that they might have been visible enough to anybody standing in the nearer portion of the grounds.

“Captain Cannonby went away with Frederick Massingbird,” observed Lionel, approaching by degrees to the questions he wished to ask.  “Did they start together?”

“Yes.  Don’t talk about it, Lionel.”

“My dear wife, I must talk about it,” he gravely answered.  “You have always put me off in this manner, so that I know little or nothing of the circumstances.  I have a reason for wishing to become cognisant of those past particulars.  Surely,” he added, a shade of deeper feeling in his tone, “at this distance of time it cannot be so very painful to your feelings to speak of Frederick Massingbird. I am by your side.”

“What is the reason that you wish to know?”

“A little matter that regarded him and Cannonby.  Was Cannonby with him when he died?”

Sibylla, subdued still, yielded to the wish as she would probably have yielded at no other time.

“Of course he was with him.  They were but a day’s journey from Melbourne.  I forget the name of the place; a sort of small village or settlement, I believe, where the people halted that were going to, or returning from, the diggings.  Frederick was taken worse as they got there, and in a few hours he died.”