e than passive abhorrence. I do not forgive: I am
at heart serious and I cannot forgive:--there is no possible
reconciliation, there can be only an ostensible truce, between the two
hostile powers dividing this world."

She glanced at him quickly.

"Good and evil!" he said.

Her face expressed a surprise relapsing on the heart.

He spelt the puckers of her forehead to mean that she feared he might
be speaking unchristianly.

"You will find it so in all religions, my dear Laetitia: the Hindoo,
the Persian, ours. It is universal; an experience of our humanity.
Deceit and sincerity cannot live together. Truth must kill the lie, or
the lie will kill truth. I do not forgive. All I say to the person is,
go!"

"But that is right! that is generous!" exclaimed Laetitia, glad to
approve him for the sake of escaping her critical soul, and relieved by
the idea of Clara's difficulty solved.

"Capable of generosity, perhaps," he mused, aloud.

She wounded him by not supplying the expected enthusiastic asseveration
of her belief in his general tendency to magnanimity.

He said, after a pause: "But the world is not likely to be impressed by
anything not immediately gratifying it. People change, I find: as we
increase in years we cease to be the heroes we were. I myself am
insensible to change: I do not admit the charge. Except in this we will
say: personal ambition. I have it no more. And what is it when we have
it? Decidedly a confession of inferiority! That is, the desire to be
distinguished is an acknowledgement of insufficiency. But I have still
the craving for my dearest friends to think well of me. A weakness?
Call it so. Not a dishonourable weakness!"

Laetitia racked her brain for the connection of his present speech with
the preceding dialogue. She was baffled, from not knowing "the heat of
the centre in him", as Vernon opaquely phrased it in charity to the
object of her worship.

"Well," said he, unappeased, "and besides the passion to excel, I have
changed somewhat in the heartiness of my thirst for the amusements
incident to my station. I do not care to keep a stud--I was once
tempted: nor hounds. And I can remember the day when I determined to
have the best kennels and the best breed of horses in the kingdom.
Puerile! What is distinction of that sort, or of any acquisition and
accomplishment? We ask! one's self is not the greater. To seek it, owns
to our smallness, in real fact; and when it is attained, what