you wrote--did not urge this suit in person.
I should not have been able to control my passion; we might have parted
foes. As it is, I restrain myself with difficulty! That woman, that
child, associated thus to tear from me the last affection left to my
ruined heart. No! You will not be so cruel! Send this, I command you,
to Lady Montfort. See again neither her nor the impostor she has been
cherishing for my disgrace. This letter will be your excuse to break off
with both--with both. GUY DARRELL."

Lionel was stunned. Not for several hours could he recover
self-possession enough to analyse his own emotions, or discern the sole
course that lay before him. After such a letter from such a benefactor,
no option was left to him. Sophy must be resigned; but the sacrifice
crushed him to the earth--crushed the very manhood out of him. He threw
himself on the floor, sobbing--sobbing as if body and soul were torn,
each from each, in convulsive spasms.

But send this letter to Lady Montfort? A letter so wholly at variance
with Darrell's dignity of character--a letter in which rage seemed
lashed to unreasoning frenzy. Such bitter language of hate and scorn,
and even insult to a woman, and to the very woman who had seemed to
Lionel so reverently to cherish the writer's name--so tenderly to scheme
for the writer's happiness! Could he obey a command that seemed to lower
Darrell even more than it could humble her to whom it was sent?

Yet disobey! What but the letter itself could explain? Ah--and was there
not some strange misunderstanding with respect to Lady Montfort, which
the letter itself, and nothing but the letter, would enable her to
dispel; and if dispelled, might not Darrell's whole mind undergo a
change? A flash of joy suddenly broke on his agitated, tempestuous
thoughts. He forced himself again to read those blotted impetuous lines.
Evidently--evidently, while writing to Lionel--the subject Sophy--the
man's wrathful heart had been addressing itself to neither. A suspicion
seized him; with that suspicion, hope. He would send the letter, and
with but few words from himself--words that revealed his immense despair
at the thought of relinquishing Sophy--intimated his belief that Darrell
here was, from some error of judgment which Lionel could not comprehend,
avenging himself on Lady Montfort; and closed with his prayer to her,
if so, to forgive lines coloured by hasty passion, and, for the sake of
all, not to disdain that se