"Despise you!" said Lucy, and her eyes filled with tears; "indeed you
wrong me and yourself. But listen to me, Mr. Clifford. I have seen, it
is true, but little of the world, yet I have seen enough to make me
wish I could have lived in retirement forever. The rarest quality among
either sex, though it is the simplest, seems to me good-nature; and the
only occupation of what are termed 'fashionable people' appears to be
speaking ill of one another. Nothing gives such a scope to scandal as
mystery; nothing disarms it like openness. I know, your friends know,
Mr. Clifford, that your character can bear inspection; and I believe,
for my own part, the same of your family. Why not, then, declare who and
what you are?"

"That candour would indeed be my best defender," said Clifford, in a
tone which ran displeasingly through Lucy's ear; "but in truth, madam, I
repeat, I care not one drop of this worthless blood what men say of me:
that time has passed, and forever; perhaps it never keenly existed for
me,--no matter. I came hither, Miss Brandon, not wasting a thought on
these sickening fooleries, or on the hoary idler by whom they are given.
I came hither only once more to see you, to hear you speak, to watch
you move, to tell you"--and the speaker's voice trembled, so as to be
scarcely audible--"to tell you, if any reason for the disclosure offered
itself, that I have had the boldness, the crime, to love--to love--O
God! to adore you; and then to leave you forever!"

Pale, trembling, scarcely preserved from falling by the tree against
which she leaned, Lucy listened to this abrupt avowal. "Dare I touch
this hand?" continued Clifford, as he knelt and took it timidly and
reverently. "You know not, you cannot dream, how unworthy is he who thus
presumes; yet not all unworthy, while he is sensible of so deep, so
holy a feeling as that which he bears to you. God bless you, Miss
Brandon!--Lucy, God bless you! And if hereafter you hear me subjected
to still blacker suspicion or severer scrutiny than that which I now
sustain; if even your charity and goodness can find no defence for
me; if the suspicion become certainty, and the scrutiny end in
condemnation,--believe at least that circumstances have carried me
beyond my nature, and that under fairer auspices I might have been other
than I am!"

Lucy's tear dropped upon Clifford's hand as he spoke; and while his
heart melted within him as he felt it and knew his own desperate and
u