ou should have tried--you should have burnt
the wound with a hot iron, or covered it with caustic. You gave no time;
and now it is too late--he is dead!"

He sank fairly down on the senseless carcase; I waited patiently a long
while, till his grief had somewhat exhausted him; and then I lifted him
in my arms and carried him to his mother, sure that she would comfort
him best. She had witnessed the whole scene from a window; she would not
come out for fear of increasing my difficulties by her emotion, but she
was ready now to receive him. She took him to her kind heart, and on
to her gentle lap; consoled him but with her lips, her eyes, her soft
embrace, for some time; and then, when his sobs diminished, told him
that Yorke had felt no pain in dying, and that if he had been left to
expire naturally, his end would have been most horrible; above all, she
told him that I was not cruel (for that idea seemed to give exquisite
pain to poor Victor), that it was my affection for Yorke and him which
had made me act so, and that I was now almost heart-broken to see him
weep thus bitterly.

Victor would have been no true son of his father, had these
considerations, these reasons, breathed in so low, so sweet a
tone--married to caresses so benign, so tender--to looks so inspired
with pitying sympathy--produced no effect on him. They did produce an
effect: he grew calmer, rested his face on her shoulder, and lay still
in her arms. Looking up, shortly, he asked his mother to tell him over
again what she had said about Yorke having suffered no pain, and my not
being cruel; the balmy words being repeated, he again pillowed his cheek
on her breast, and was again tranquil.

Some hours after, he came to me in my library, asked if I forgave him,
and desired to be reconciled. I drew the lad to my side, and there I
kept him a good while, and had much talk with him, in the course of
which he disclosed many points of feeling and thought I approved of in my
son. I found, it is true, few elements of the "good fellow" or the "fine
fellow" in him; scant sparkles of the spirit which loves to flash over
the wine cup, or which kindles the passions to a destroying fire; but I
saw in the soil of his heart healthy and swelling germs of compassion,
affection, fidelity. I discovered in the garden of his intellect a
rich growth of wholesome principles--reason, justice, moral courage,
promised, if not blighted, a fertile bearing. So I bestowed on his large