rk it at the time, that while his
voice and manner were calm, there was a burning glow upon his handsome
cheek, and a suppressed exultation in his eye, that I had never
observed on either before. I then quitted the room; and hastening to my
company with a gloom on--my brow that indicated the wretchedness of my
inward spirit, was soon afterwards on the march from ----."

Again the warrior seemed agitated with the most violent emotion; he
buried his face in his hands; and the silence that ensued was longer
than any he had previously indulged in. At length he made an effort to
arouse himself; and again exhibiting his swarthy features, disclosed a
brow, not clouded, as before, by grief, but animated with the fiercest
and most appalling passions, while he thus impetuously resumed.

CHAPTER XI.

"If, hitherto, Clara de Haldimar, I have been minute in the detail of
all that attended my connection with your mother, it has been with a
view to prove to you how deeply I have been injured; but I have now
arrived at a part of my history, when to linger on the past would goad
me into madness, and render me unfit for the purpose to which I have
devoted myself. Brief must be the probing of wounds, that nearly five
lustres have been insufficient to heal; brief the tale that reveals the
infamy of those who have given you birth, and the utter blighting of
the fairest hopes of one whose only fault was that of loving, "not too
wisely, but too well."

"Will you credit the monstrous truth," he added, in a fierce but
composed whisper, while he bent eagerly over the form of the trembling
yet attentive girl, "when I tell you that, on my return from that fatal
expedition, during my continuance on which her image had never once
been absent from my mind, I found Clara Beverley the wife of De
Haldimar? Yes," continued Wacousta, his wounded feeling and mortified
pride chafing, by the bitter recollection, into increasing fury, while
his countenance paled in its swarthiness, "the wife, the wedded wife of
yon false and traitorous governor! Well may you look surprised, Clara
de Haldimar: such damnable treachery as this may startle his own blood
in the veins of another, nor find its justification even in the
devotedness of woman's filial piety. To what satanic arts so
calculating a villain could have had recourse to effect his object I
know not; but it is not the less true, that she, from whom my previous
history must have taught you to expect t