he purity of intention and
conduct of an angel, became his wife,--and I a being accursed among
men. Even as our common mother is said to have fallen in the garden of
Eden, tempted by the wily beauty of the devil, so did your mother fall,
seduced by that of the cold, false, traitorous De Haldimar." Here the
agitation of Wacousta became terrific. The labouring of his chest was
like that of one convulsed with some racking agony and the swollen
veins and arteries of his head seemed to threaten the extinction of
life in some fearful paroxysm. At length he burst into a violent fit of
tears, more appalling, in one of his iron nature, than the fury which
had preceded it,--and it was many minutes before he could so far
compose himself as to resume.

"Think not, Clara de Haldimar, I speak without the proof. Her own words
confessed, her own lips avowed it, and yet I neither slew her, nor her
paramour, nor myself. On my return to the regiment I had flown to the
cottage, on the wings of the most impatient and tender love that ever
filled the bosom of man for woman. To my enquiries the landlady
replied, that my cousin had been married two days previously, by the
military chaplain, to a handsome young officer, who had visited her
soon after my departure, and was constantly with her from that moment;
and that immediately after the ceremony they had left, but she knew not
whither. Wild, desperate, almost bereft of reason, and with a heart
bounding against my bosom, as if each agonising throb were to be its
last, I ran like a maniac back into the town, nor paused till I found
myself in the presence of your father. My mind was a volcano, but still
I attempted to be calm, even while I charged him, in the most
outrageous terms, with his villainy. Deny it he could not; but, far
from excusing it, he boldly avowed and justified the step he had taken,
intimating, with a smile full of meaning, there was nothing in a
connection with the family of De Haldimar to reflect disgrace on the
cousin of Sir Reginald Morton; and that; the highest compliment he
could pay his friend was to attach himself to one whom that friend had
declared to be so near a relative of his own. There was a coldness of
taunt in these remarks, that implied his sense of the deception I had
practised on him, in regard to the true nature of the relationship; and
for a moment, while my hand firmly grasped the hilt of my sword, I
hesitated whether I should not cut him down at my fee