he associated with Emilia's voice, made him entreat her to
be silent. After a space, he breathed a long breath of relief, saying:
"No, no; you're firm enough on your feet. I don't think I ever saw you
dance. My girls have given it up. What led me to think...but, let's to
bed, and say our prayers. I want a kiss."

Emilia kissed him on the forehead. The symptoms of illness were strange
to her, and passed unheeded. She was too full of her own burning passion
to take evidence from her sight. The sun of her world was threatened
with extinction. She felt herself already a wanderer in a land of tombs,
where none could say whether morning had come or gone. Intensely she
looked her misery in the face; and it was as a voice that said, "No sun:
never sun any more," to her. But a blue-hued moon slipped from among
the clouds, and hung in the black outstretched fingers of the tree of
darkness, fronting troubled waters. "This is thy light for ever! thou
shalt live in thy dream." So, as in a prison-house, did her soul now
recall the blissful hours by Wilming Weir. She sickened but an instant.
The blood in her veins was too strong a tide for her to crouch in that
imagined corpse-like universe which alternates with an irradiated Eden
in the brain of the passionate young.

"Why should I lose him!" The dry sob choked her.

She struggled with the emotion in her throat, and Mr. Pole, who had
previously dreaded supplication and appeals for pity, caressed her.
Instantly the flood poured out.

"You are not cruel. I knew it. I should have died, if you had come
between us. Oh, Wilfrid's father, I love you!--I have never had a very
angry word on my mouth. Think! think! if you had made me curse you. For,
I could! You would have stopped my life, and Wilfrid's. What would our
last thoughts have been? We could not have forgiven you. Take up dead
birds killed by frost. You cry: Cruel winter! murdering cold! But I
knew better. You are Wilfrid's father, whom I can kneel to. My lover's
father! my own father! my friend next to heaven! Oh! bless my love,
for him. You have only to know what my love for him is! The thought of
losing him goes like perishing cold through my bones;--my heart jerks,
as if it had to pull up my body from the grave every time it beats...."

"God in heaven!" cried the horrified merchant, on whose susceptible
nerves these images wrought with such a force that he absolutely had
dread of her. He gasped, and felt at his heart, and t