It is a most humbling
thought. God help us. He forgot how she had avoided him, resisted him,
refused to confess the love which his goodness, his importunities, his
besieging love had compelled in her heart. It was true she ought either
to have refused him absolutely and left him, or confessed and left the
matter with him; but he ought to have remembered for another, if ever he
had known it for himself, the hardness of some duties; and what duty
could be more torturing to a delicate-minded woman than either of
those--to leave the man she loved in passionate pain, sore-wounded with
a sense of undeserved cruelty, or to give him the strength to send her
from him by confessing to his face what she could not recall in the
solitude of her own chamber but the agony would break out wet on her
forehead! We do our brother, our sister, grievous wrong, every time
that, in our selfish justice, we forget the excuse that mitigates the
blame. That God never does, for it would be to disregard the truth. As
He will never admit a false excuse, so will He never neglect a true one.
It may be He makes excuses which the sinner dares not think of; while
the most specious of false ones shrivel into ashes before Him. A man is
bound to think of all just excuse for his offender, for less than the
righteousness of God will not serve his turn.

I would not have my reader set Faber down as heartless, His life showed
the contrary. But his pride was roused to such furious self-assertion,
that his heart lay beaten down under the sweep of its cyclone. Its turn
was only delayed. The heart is always there, and rage is not. The heart
is a constant, even when most intermittent force. It can bide its time.
Nor indeed did it now lie quite still; for the thought of that white,
self-offered sacrifice, let him rave as he would against the
stage-trickery of the scene, haunted him so, that once and again he had
to rouse an evil will to restrain him from rushing to clasp her to his
bosom.

Then there was the question: why now had she told him all--if indeed she
had made a clean breast of it? Was it from love to him, or reviving
honesty in herself? From neither, he said. Superstition alone was at the
root of it. She had been to church, and the preaching of that honest
idiotic enthusiast, Wingfold, had terrified her.--Alas! what refuge in
her terror had she found with her husband?

Before morning he had made up his mind as to the course he would pursue.
He would not