. Call me a thief, if you will, if the word does not blister your
tongue to utter it. I confess it all. Now leave me to my fate."

"Confess one thing more," said Mittie, "speak to me as if it were your
dying hour--for you will soon be dead to me, and tell me, if it is for
the love of Helen you abandon mine?"

Clinton hesitated, a red color flushed his pallid cheek. He could not at
that moment, in the presence of such deep and true passion, utter a
falsehood; and degraded as he was, he could not bear to inflict the pain
an avowal of the truth might cause.

"Speak," she urged, "and speak truly. It is all the atonement I ask."

"My love can only reflect disgrace on its object. Rejoice that it rests
on her, rather than yourself. But she has avenged your wrongs. She
rejected me before my hand was polluted with this last foul crime. She
upbraided me for my perfidy to you, and fled from my sight with horror.
Had she loved me, I might have been saved--but I am lost now."

Mittie stood immovable as a statue. Her eyes were fixed upon the floor,
her brow contracted and her lips firmly closed. She appeared to be going
through a petrifying process, so marble was her complexion, so rigid her
features, so unchanging her attitude.

"'Twas but a moment o'er her soul
Winters of memory seemed to roll,"

congealing her as they rolled. As Clinton looked upon her and contrasted
that pale and altered form, with the resplendent figure that he had
beheld like an embodied rainbow on the sun-gilded arch, his conscience
stung him with a scorpion sting. He had said to himself, while parlying
with the tempter about the gold, that he had never _stolen_. He now felt
convicted of a far worse robbery, of a more inexpiable crime--for which
God, if not man, would judge him--the theft of a young and trusting
heart, of its peace, its confidence and hope, leaving behind a cold and
dreary void. He could not bear the sight of that desolate figure, so
lately quickened with glowing passions.

"Clinton," said Mittie, breaking the silence in a low, oppressed voice,
"I see you have one virtue left, of the wreck of all others. I honor
that one. You asked me why I came. I will tell you. I knew you guilty,
steeped in ignominy, the scorn and by-word of the town, guilty too of a
crime more vile than murder, for murder may be committed from the wild
impulse of exasperated passion--but theft is a cold, deliberate,
selfish, coward act. Yet knowing all this,