tless recall, if
no positive pledge to Susan, at least those words and tones which betray
the one heart, and seek to allure the other; and the profound melancholy
stamped on his whole person, apparent even to her hurried glance,
touched her with a compassion free from all the bitterness of selfish
reproach. She fancied she could die happy if she could remove that cloud
from his brow, that shadow from his conscience. Die; for she thought not
of life. She loved gently, quietly,--not with the vehement passion that
belongs to stronger natures; but it was the love of which the young and
the pure have died. The face of the Genius was calm and soft; and only
by the lowering of the hand do you see that the torch burns out, and
that the image too serene for earthly love is the genius of loving
Death.

Absorbed in the egotism of her passion (increased, as is ever the case
with women, even the worst, by the sacrifices it had cost her), and if
that passion paused, by the energy of her ambition, which already began
to scheme and reconstruct new scaffolds to repair the ruined walls of
the past,--Lucretia as yet had not detected what was so apparent to the
simple sense of Mr. Fielden. That Mainwaring was grave and thoughtful
and abstracted, she ascribed only to his grief at the thought of her
loss, and his anxieties for her altered future; and in her efforts to
console him, her attempts to convince him that greatness in England did
not consist only in lands and manors,--that in the higher walks of life
which conduct to the Temple of Renown, the leaders of the procession
are the aristocracy of knowledge and of intellect,--she so betrayed, not
generous emulation and high-souled aspiring, but the dark, unscrupulous,
tortuous ambition of cunning, stratagem, and intrigue, that instead
of feeling grateful and encouraged, he shuddered and revolted. How,
accompanied and led by a spirit which he felt to be stronger and more
commanding than his own,--how preserve the whiteness of his soul, the
uprightness of his honour? Already he felt himself debased. But in the
still trial of domestic intercourse, with the daily, hourly dripping on
the stone, in the many struggles between truth and falsehood, guile
and candour, which men--and, above all, ambitious men--must wage,
what darker angel would whisper him in his monitor? Still, he was
bound,--bound with an iron band; he writhed, but dreamed not of escape.

The day after that of Fielden's conference