she listens to the voice of him she
loves--as she sits musing by the window, with the church spire just
visible--as day by day the soul brightens and expands within her--still
let the reader see within the same walls, greyhaired, blind, dull to all
feeling, frozen to all life, that stony image of Time and Death! Perhaps
then he may understand why they who beheld the real and living Fanny
blooming under that chill and mass of shadow, felt that her grace, her
simplicity, her charming beauty, were raised by the contrast, till
they grew associated with thoughts and images, mysterious and profound,
belonging not more to the lovely than to the sublime.

So there sat the old man; and Philip, though aware of his presence,
speaking as if he were alone with Fanny, after touching on more casual
topics, thus addressed her:

"My true and my dear friend, it is to you that I shall owe, not only my
rights and fortune, but the vindication of my mother's memory. You have
not only placed flowers upon that gravestone, but it is owing to you,
under Providence, that it will be inscribed at last with the Name which
refutes all calumny. Young and innocent as you now are, my gentle and
beloved benefactress, you cannot as yet know what a blessing it will be
to me to engrave that Name upon that simple stone. Hereafter, when you
yourself are a wife, a mother, you will comprehend the service you have
rendered to the living and the dead!"

He stopped--struggling with the rush of emotions that overflowed his
heart. Alas, THE DEAD! what service can we render to them?--what availed
it now, either to the dust below, or to the immortality above, that the
fools and knaves of this world should mention the Catherine whose life
was gone, whose ears were deaf, with more or less respect? There is
in calumny that poison that, even when the character throws off the
slander, the heart remains diseased beneath the effect. They say that
truth comes sooner or later; but it seldom comes before the soul,
passing from agony to contempt, has grown callous to men's judgments.
Calumniate a human being in youth--adulate that being in age;--what has
been the interval? Will the adulation atone either for the torture, or
the hardness which the torture leaves at last? And if, as in Catherine's
case (a case, how common!), the truth come too late--if the tomb is
closed--if the heart you have wrung can be wrung no more--why the truth
is as valueless as the epitaph on a forgotte