e him," cried Fanny; "I have been betrayed by
my own servants,--brought here, I know not how! I heard my father was
ill; I was on my way to him that man met me here and dared to--"

"Miss Trevanion--yes, I dared to say I loved you!"

"Protect me from him! You will protect me from him?"

"No, madam!" said a voice behind me, in a deep tone; "it is I who claim
the right to protect you from that man; it is I who now draw around you
the arm of one sacred, even to him; it is I who, from this spot,
launch upon his head--a father's curse. Violator of the hearth, baffled
ravisher, go thy way to the doom which thou hast chosen for thyself! God
will be merciful to me yet, and give me a grave before thy course find
its close in the hulks or at the gallows!"

A sickness came over me, a terror froze my veins; I reeled back, and
leaned for support against the wall. Roland had passed his arm round
Fanny, and she, frail and trembling, clung to his broad breast, looking
fearfully up to his face. And never in that face, ploughed by deep
emotions and dark with unutterable sorrows, had I seen an expression so
grand in its wrath, so sublime in its despair. Following the direction
of his eye, stern and fixed as the look of one who prophesies a destiny
and denounces a doom, I shivered as I gazed upon the son. His whole
frame seemed collapsed and shrinking, as if already withered by the
curse; a ghastly whiteness overspread the cheek, usually glowing with
the dark bloom of Oriental youth; the knees knocked together; and at
last, with a faint exclamation of pain, like the cry of one who
receives a death-blow, he bowed his face over his clasped hands, and so
remained--still, but cowering.

Instinctively I advanced, and placed myself between the father and the
son, murmuring, "Spare him; see, his own heart crushes him down."
Then stealing towards the son, I whispered, "Go, go; the crime was not
committed, the curse can be recalled." But my words touched a wrong
chord in that dark and rebellious nature. The young man withdrew his
hands hastily from his face and reared his front in passionate defiance.

Waving me aside, he cried, "Away! I acknowledge no authority over my
actions and my fate; I allow no mediator between this lady and myself!
Sir," he continued, gazing gloomily on his father,--"sir, you forget our
compact. Our ties were severed, your power over me annulled; I resigned
the name you bear: to you I was, and am still, as the dead. I