art and wronging
your noble cousin? Are you innocent in this matter? Tell me!" placing
his hand on her head, he pressed it slowly back and gazed into her eyes;
then, without a word, took her to his breast and looked calmly around
him.

"She is innocent!" said he.

It was the uplifting of a stifling pall. No one in the room, unless it
was the wretched criminal shivering before us, but felt a sudden influx
of hope. Even Mary's own countenance caught a glow. "Oh!" she whispered,
withdrawing from his arms to look better into his face, "and is this the
man I have trifled with, injured, and tortured, till the very name of
Mary Leavenworth might well make him shudder? Is this he whom I married
in a fit of caprice, only to forsake and deny? Henry, do you declare
me innocent in face of all you have seen and heard; in face of that
moaning, chattering wretch before us, and my own quaking flesh and
evident terror; with the remembrance on your heart and in your mind of
the letter I wrote you the morning after the murder, in which I prayed
you to keep away from me, as I was in such deadly danger the least hint
given to the world that I had a secret to conceal would destroy me? Do
you, can you, will you, declare me innocent before God and the world?"

"I do," said he.

A light such as had never visited her face before passed slowly over it.
"Then God forgive me the wrong I have done this noble heart, for I can
never forgive myself! Wait!" said she, as he opened his lips. "Before I
accept any further tokens of your generous confidence, let me show you
what I am. You shall know the worst of the woman you have taken to your
heart. Mr. Raymond," she cried, turning towards me for the first time,
"in those days when, with such an earnest desire for my welfare (you see
I do not believe this man's insinuations), you sought to induce me to
speak out and tell all I knew concerning this dreadful deed, I did not
do it because of my selfish fears. I knew the case looked dark against
me. Eleanore had told me so. Eleanore herself--and it was the keenest
pang I had to endure--believed me guilty. She had her reasons. She knew
first, from the directed envelope she had found lying underneath my
uncle's dead body on the library table, that he had been engaged at the
moment of death in summoning his lawyer to make that change in his will
which would transfer my claims to her; secondly, that notwithstanding
my denial of the same, I had been down to his