ugh unable to guess the true and terrible cause of his
dejection) that he forgot his desire to hasten from the spot, and cried
with all his kindliness of heart, "You are ill, you faint; give him your
arm, Pisistratus."

"It is nothing," said Roland, feebly, as he leaned heavily on my arm
while I turned back my head, with all the bitterness of that reproach
which filled my heart speaking in the eyes that sought him whose place
should have been where mine now was. And oh!--thank Heaven, thank
Heaven!--the look was not in vain. In the same moment the son was at the
father's knees.

"Oh, pardon, pardon! Wretch, lost wretch though I be, I bow my head
to the curse. Let it fall,--but on me, and on me only; not on your own
heart too."

Fanny burst into tears, sobbing out, "Forgive him, as I do."

Roland did not heed her.

"He thinks that the heart was not shattered before the curse could
come," he said, in a voice so weak as to be scarcely audible. Then,
raising his eyes to heaven, his lips moved as if he prayed inly.
Pausing, he stretched his hands over his son's head, and averting his
face, said, "I revoke the curse. Pray to thy God for pardon."

Perhaps not daring to trust himself further, he then made a violent
effort and hurried from the room.

We followed silently. When we gained the end of the passage, the door of
the room we had left closed with a sullen jar.

As the sound smote on my ear, with it came so terrible a sense of
the solitude upon which that door had closed, so keen and quick an
apprehension of some fearful impulse, suggested by passions so fierce to
a condition so forlorn, that instinctively I stopped, and then hurried
back to the chamber. The lock of the door having been previously forced,
there was no barrier to oppose my entrance. I advanced, and beheld
a spectacle of such agony as can only be conceived by those who have
looked on the grief which takes no fortitude from reason, no consolation
from conscience,--the grief which tells us what would be the earth were
man abandoned to his passions, and the Chance of the atheist reigned
alone in the merciless heavens. Pride humbled to the dust; ambition
shivered into fragments; love (or the passion mistaken for it) blasted
into ashes; life, at the first onset, bereaved of its holiest ties,
forsaken by its truest guide; shame that writhed for revenge; and
remorse that knew not prayer,--all, all blended, yet distinct, were in
that awful spectacle of th