y side, well may you weep! Never can
earth give you back such love as you lost in mine."

"I know it, I know it--fool that I was--miserable fool!"

"Ay, but comfort yourself--wilder and sadder folly in myself! Your
mother was right. 'The vain child,' she said, 'knows not her own heart.
She is new to the world--has seen none of her own years. For your
sake, as for hers, I must insist on the experiment of absence. A
year's ordeal--see if she is then of the same mind.' I marvelled at her
coldness; proudly I submitted to her seasonings; fearlessly I confided
the result to you. Ah! how radiant was your smile, when, in the parting
hour, I said, 'Summer and you will return again!' In vain, on pretence
that the experiment should be complete, did your mother carry you
abroad, and exact from us both the solemn promise that not even a letter
should pass between us--that our troth, made thus conditional, should
be a secret to all--in vain, if meant to torture me with doubt. In my
creed, a doubt is itself a treason. How lovely grew the stern face of
Ambition!--how Fame seemed as a messenger from me to you! In the sound
of applause I said 'They cannot shut out the air that will carry that
sound to her ears! All that I can win from honour shall be my marriage
gifts to my queenly bride.' See that arrested pile--begun at my son's
birth, stopped awhile at his death, recommenced on a statelier plan
when I thought of your footstep on its floors--your shadow on its walls.
Stopped now forever! Architects can build a palace; can they build
a home? But you--you--you, all the while--your smile on another's
suit--your thoughts on another's hearth!"

"Not so!--not so! Your image never forsook me. I was giddy, thoughtless,
dazzled, entangled; and I told you in the letter you returned to
me--told you that I had been deceived!"

"Patience--patience! Deceived! Do you imagine that I do not see all that
passed as in a magician's glass? Caroline Montfort, you never loved
me; you never knew what love was. Thrown suddenly into the gay world,
intoxicated by the effect of your own beauty, my sombre figure gradually
faded dim--pale ghost indeed in the atmosphere of flowers and lustres,
rank with the breath of flatterers. Then came my lord the Marquess--a
cousin privileged to familiar intimacy to visit at will, to ride with
you, dance with you, sit side by side with you in quiet corners of
thronging ball-rooms, to call you 'Caroline.' Tut, tut--they are on