oh, my lord, believe me, it was not
deliberate, it was hasty passion! and now I would be willing to wipe
out every word in those hateful letters with my heart's blood!"

Hilda's voice was low but impassioned, with a certain burning fervor
of entreaty; her words had become words almost of prayer, so deep was
her humiliation. Her face was turned toward him with an imploring
expression, and her eyes were fixed on his in what seemed an agony of
suspense. But not even that white face, with its ashen lips and its
anguish, nor those eyes with their overflowing tears, nor that voice
with its touching pathos of woe, availed in any way to call up any
response of pity and sympathy in the breast of Lord Chetwynde.

"You use strong language, Lady Chetwynde," said he, in his usual
tone. "You forget that it is you yourself who have transformed all my
former kindliness, in spite of myself, into bitterness and gall. You
forget, above all, that last letter of yours. You seem to show an
emotion which I once would have taken as real. Pardon me if I now say
that I consider it nothing more than consummate acting. You speak of
consideration. You hint at mercy. Listen, Lady Chetwynde"--and here
Lord Chetwynde raised his right hand with solemn emphasis. "You
turned away from the death-bed of my father, the man who loved you
like a daughter, to write to me that hideous letter which you
wrote--that letter, every word of which is still in my memory, and
rises up between us to sunder us for evermore. You went beyond
yourself. To have spared the living was not needed; but it was the
misfortune of your nature that you could not spare the dead. While he
was, perhaps, yet lying cold in death near you, you had the heart to
write to me bitter sneers against him. Even without that you had done
enough to turn me from you always. But when I read that, I then knew
most thoroughly that the one who was capable, under such
circumstances, of writing thus could only have a mind and heart
irretrievably bad--bad and corrupt and base. Never, never, never,
while I live, can I forget the utter horror with which that letter
filled me!"

"Oh, my God!" said Hilda, with a groan.

Lord Chetwynde sat stern and silent.

"You are inflexible in your cruelty," said Hilda at length, as she
made one last and almost hopeless effort. "I have done. But will you
not ask me something? Have you nothing to ask about your father? He
loved me as a daughter. I was the one who nursed