positions
themselves. They were the letters of one whom my father loved, and of
whom he always spoke in the tenderest language, but who yet was so
faithless to him that she never ceased to taunt me with what she
called our baseness. She never spared the old man who loved her. For
months and for years these letters came. It was something more than
pique, something more than self-conceit or spite, which lay at the
bottom of such long-continued insults. The worst feature about them
was their cold-blooded cruelty. Nothing in my circumstances or
condition could prevent this--not even that long agony before
Delhi"--added Lord Chetwynde, in tones filled with a deeper
indignation--"when I, lost behind the smoke and cloud and darkness of
the great struggle, was unable to write for a long time; and,
finally, was able to give my account of the assault and the triumph.
Not even that could change the course of the insults which were so
freely heaped upon me. And yet it would have been easy to avoid all
this. Why write at all? There was no heavy necessity laid upon you.
That was the question which I used to put to myself. But you
persisted in writing, and in sending to me over the seas, with
diabolical pertinacity, those hideous letters in which every word was
a stab."

While Lord Chetwynde had been speaking Hilda sat looking at him, and
meeting his stern glance with a look which would have softened any
one less bitter. Paler and paler grew her face, and her hands
clutched one another in tremulous agitation, which showed her strong
emotion.

"Oh, my lord!" she cried, as he ceased, "can you not have mercy?
Think of that black cloud that came down over my young life, filling
it with gloom and horror. I confess that you and your father appeared
the chief agents; but I learned to love _him_, and then all my
bitterness turned on _you_--you, who seemed to be so prosperous, so
brave, and so honored. It was you who seemed to have blighted my
life, and so I was animated by a desire to make you feel something of
what I had felt. My disposition is fiery and impetuous; my father's
training made it worse. I did not know you; I only felt spite against
you, and thus I wrote those fatal letters. I thought that you could
have prevented that marriage if you had wished, and therefore could
never feel any thing but animosity. But now the sorrows through which
I have passed have changed me, and you yourself have made me see how
mad was my action. But