me a year hence. If I come back to you and bring you fame, will
that please you? If I do what you desire most--what he who is dead desired
most--will that soften you?"

"What is it, Henry?" says she, her face lighting up; "what mean you?"

"Ask no questions," he said, "wait, and give me but time; if I bring back
that you long for, that I have a thousand times heard you pray for, will
you have no reward for him who has done you that service? Put away those
trinkets, keep them: it shall not be at my marriage, it shall not be at
yours, but if man can do it, I swear a day shall come when there shall be
a feast in your house, and you shall be proud to wear them. I say no more
now; put aside these words, and lock away yonder box until the day when I
shall remind you of both. All I pray of you now is, to wait and to
remember."

"You are going out of the country?" says Beatrix, in some agitation.

"Yes, to-morrow," says Esmond.

"To Lorraine, cousin?" says Beatrix, laying her hand on his arm; 'twas the
hand on which she wore the duke's bracelet. "Stay, Harry!" continued she,
with a tone that had more despondency in it than she was accustomed to
show. "Hear a last word. I do love you. I do admire you--who would not,
that has known such love as yours has been for us all? But I think I have
no heart; at least, I have never seen the man that could touch it; and,
had I found him, I would have followed him in rags had he been a private
soldier, or to sea, like one of those buccaneers you used to read to us
about when we were children. I would do anything for such a man, bear
anything for him: but I never found one. You were ever too much of a slave
to win my heart; even my lord duke could not command it. I had not been
happy had I married him. I knew that three months after our engagement--and
was too vain to break it. O Harry! I cried once or twice, not for him, but
with tears of rage because I could not be sorry for him. I was frightened
to find I was glad of his death; and were I joined to you, I should have
the same sense of servitude, the same longing to escape. We should both be
unhappy, and you the most, who are as jealous as the duke was himself. I
tried to love him; I tried, indeed I did: affected gladness when he came:
submitted to hear when he was by me, and tried the wife's part I thought I
was to play for the rest of my days. But half an hour of that complaisance
wearied me, and what would a lifetime be? My thoughts w