Radclyffe, entertained for her any feeling warmer
than friendship, she never for an instant suspected; that suspicion
alone would have driven him from her presence for ever. And although
there had been a time, in his bright and exulting youth, when Radclyffe
had not been without those arts which win, in the opposite sex,
affection from aversion itself, those arts doubled, ay, a hundredfold,
in their fascination, would not have availed him with the pure but
disappointed Constance, even had a sense of right and wrong very
different from the standard he now acknowledged permitted him to exert
them. So that his was rather the sacrifice of impulse, than of any
triumph that impulse could afterwards have gained him.

Many, and soft and sweet were now the recollections of Constance. Her
heart flew back to her early love among the shades of Wendover; to the
first confession of the fair enthusiastic boy, when he offered at her
shrine a mind, a genius, a heart capable of fruits which the indolence
of after-life, and the lethargy of disappointed hope, had blighted
before their time.

If he was now so deaf to what she considered the nobler, because more
stirring, excitements of life, was she not in some measure answerable
for the supineness? Had there not been a day in which he had vowed to
toil, to labour, to sacrifice the very character of his mind, for a
union with her? Was she, after all, was she right to adhere so rigidly
to her father's dying words, and to that vow afterwards confirmed by her
own pride and bitterness of soul? She looked to her father's portrait
for an answer; and that daring and eloquent face seemed, for the first
time, cold and unanswering to her appeal.

In such meditations the hours passed, and midnight came on without
Constance having quitted her apartment. She now summoned her woman, and
inquired if Godolphin was at home. He had come in about an hour since,
and, complaining of fatigue, had retired to rest. Constance again
dismissed her maid, and stole to his apartment. He was already asleep,
his cheek rested on his arm, and his hair fell wildly over a brow that
now worked under the influence of his dreams. Constance put the light
softly down, and seating herself beside him, watched over a sleep which,
if it had come suddenly on him, was not the less unquiet and disturbed.
At length he muttered, "Yes, Lucilla, yes; I tell you, you are avenged.
I have not forgotten you! I have not forgotten that I betraye