e a heart that recoils from shame!
Ah, madam, we Chillinglys are a very obscure, undistinguished race, but
for more than a thousand years we have been English gentlemen. Guard her
secret rather than risk the chance of discovery that could give her a
pang! I would pass my whole life by her side in Kamtchatka, and even
there I would not snatch a glimpse of the secret itself with mine own
eyes: it should be so closely muffled and wrapped round by the folds of
reverence and worship."

This burst of passion seemed to Mrs. Cameron the senseless declamation
of an inexperienced, hot-headed young man; and putting it aside, much
as a great lawyer dismisses as balderdash the florid rhetoric of some
junior counsel, rhetoric in which the great lawyer had once indulged,
or as a woman for whom romance is over dismisses as idle verbiage some
romantic sentiment that befools her young daughter, Mrs. Cameron simply
replied, "All this is hollow talk, Mr. Chillingly; let us come to the
point. After all I have said, do you mean to persist in your suit to my
niece?"

"I persist."

"What!" she cried, this time indignantly, and with generous indignation;
"what, even were it possible that you could win your parents' consent to
marry the child of a man condemned to penal servitude, or, consistently
with the duties a son owes to parents, conceal that fact from them,
could you, born to a station on which every gossip will ask, 'Who and
what is the name of the future Lady Chillingly?' believe that the
who and the what will never be discovered! Have you, a mere stranger,
unknown to us a few weeks ago, a right to say to Walter Melville,
'Resign to me that which is your sole reward for the sublime sacrifices,
for the loyal devotion, for the watchful tenderness of patient years'?"

"Surely, madam," cried Kenelm, more startled, more shaken in soul by
this appeal, than by the previous revelations, "surely, when we
last parted, when I confided to you my love for your niece, when you
consented to my proposal to return home and obtain my father's approval
of my suit,--surely then was the time to say, 'No; a suitor with claims
paramount and irresistible has come before you.'"

"I did not then know, Heaven is my witness, I did not then even suspect,
that Walter Melville ever dreamed of seeking a wife in the child who had
grown up under his eyes. You must own, indeed, how much I discouraged
your suit; I could not discourage it more without revealing the se