ored
with a ceaseless and bitter sorrow, and day after day, with
tears and groans, entreated the forgiveness of her
thrice-injured child. Patiently and mercifully did Alice listen
to that misguided and unhappy woman's confessions; she
abstained by a reproachful look or a severe word from heaping
fresh misery on that aged and humbled head, but she pondered
over these things in silence; and when she returned to Henry's
side and he held out his hand to greet her, hers was cold and
nervous, and her heart sunk within her as she fished her eyes
on his, and in their wild and restless expression read that
fearful retribution which sometimes falls on those who have
walked in their own ways, and defied the justice of an
Almighty Judge, till the light that was in them has become
darkness, and His awful vengeance has overtaken them. Great
indeed was that darkness in Henry Lovell's case--greater still
from the light that had once been in him. Sparks of genius,
touches of feeling, relics of the high capabilities of mind
that had once been his, flashed through the night of his soul,
and made its present darkness more sadly visible.

Alas, for all that God gives and man destroys! Alas, for all
that might be and is not! Genius and intellect, which should
subdue and regenerate worlds, and with noble thoughts, and
words of fire, carry the truth from one hemisphere to the
other--where are ye? What do ye? Consumed upon the altar of a
withering selfishness--cramped and debased by the bonds of a
narrow scepticism--man has prostituted you to vile uses.
Slaves of his passions, and ministers of evil, He has made
you;--and where God had said, "Let there be light," has too
often answered, "Let there be darkness."

Henry's gloomy and wayward depression increased every day,
although his intellect was not wholly obscured; but at the
times that it was clearest, he seemed to suffer more than
during its hours of partial aberration. He gave way less than
at first to fits of violent irritation; the terrible
expressions he used to utter, and the murmurs and curses which
rose to his lips with such frightful bitterness, were at an
end. He even ceased to ask that fatal question with which he
had been wont to torture his wife and sister; he listened in
silence to what they said, and once made a faint attempt to
smile when Alice spoke cheerfully to him. He often gazed on
her in silence, and watched her intently as she moved about
the room. Once, when she