d to you, my letter?"

"Oh! Mr. Darrell, how could you have the heart to write in such terms of
one who--"

"One who had taken the heart from my bosom and trampled it into the
mire. True, fribbles will say, 'Fie! the vocabulary of fine gentlemen
has no harsh terms for women.' Gallants, to whom love is pastime, leave
or are left with elegant sorrow and courtly bows. Madam, I was never
such airy gallant. I am but a man unhappily in earnest--a man who placed
in those hands his life of life--who said to you, while yet in his
prime, 'There is my future, take it, till it vanish out of earth! You
have made that life substanceless as a ghost--that future barren as the
grave. And when you dare force yourself again upon my way, and would
dictate laws to my very hearth--if I speak as a man what plain men must
feel--'Oh! Mr. Darrell,' says your injured ladyship, 'how can you have
the heart?' Woman! were you not false as the falsest? Falsehood has no
dignity to awe rebuke--falsehood no privilege of sex."

"Darrell--Darrell--Darrell--spare me, spare me! I have been so
punished--I am so miserable!"

"You!--punished!--What! you sold yourself to youth, and sleek looks,
and grand titles, and the flattery of a world; and your rose-leaves were
crumpled in the gorgeous marriage-bed. Adequate punishment!--a crumpled
rose-leaf! True, the man was a--but why should I speak ill of him?
It was he who was punished, if, accepting his rank, you recognised in
himself a nothingness that you could neither love nor honour. False and
ungrateful alike to the man you chose--to the man you forsook! And now
you have buried one, and you have schemed to degrade the other."

"Degrade!--Oh! it is that charge which has stung me to the quick. All
the others I deserve. But that charge! Listen--you shall listen."

"I stand here resigned to do so. Say all you will now, for it is the
last time on earth I lend my ears to your voice."

"Be it so--the last time." She paused to recover speech, collect
thoughts, gain strength; and strange though it may seem to those who
have never loved, amidst all her grief and humiliation there was a
fearful delight in that presence from which she had been exiled since
her youth--nay, delight unaccountable to herself, even in that rough,
vehement, bitter tempest of reproach, for an instinct told her that
there would have been no hatred in the language had no love been
lingering in the soul.

"Speak," said Darrell gently, softene