"Have pity, Miles!" she cried, her eyes streaming with tears which nearly choked her, as she clasped her hands, and kneeling, looked up to where he stood, for he had shaken her off as she clung to him. "But if you knew what dreadful struggles of nearly maddening power ground my heart down to bitterness, and _revenge_," (she almost whispered the last word,) "before I committed this fearful sin against myself, _you_, and, far more than all, the memory of your sainted mother, you might find some excuse. You cannot forget how my presumptuous heart, forgetting all but her more than woman's kindness, dared to lose sight, from her gentleness, of the distance between us, and loved you. You cannot forget the day I dreamed you returned it, and boldly confessed mine; you were calm, dignified, manly, and generous, when you said you never could return it--that I had mistaken you, and you hoped myself, and when you drew me to your heart with a _brother's_ love--Oh, may you never know such humiliation as _I_ felt then, which turned to a blacker feeling afterwards, fostered by him; for when you, for my sake, absented yourself from home for months, you cannot know how this weak heart was worked upon by _him_. He had seen all, guessed all; and, unsuspecting his motives, I one day confessed the truth to him. From that hour he became the friend, the comforter; he alone spoke hope to me--a hope his every action discredited faith in. Then your mother died; events were drawing to a close; you returned, no thought of love in your heart; I repressed my mad affection for you, but I was weighed to earth by the effort. I was but a girl of eighteen in a villain's hands, when the downfall of all came; your father's death, your banishment----"
"And did not all these sad events, Mary," and his voice was low and trembling as he looked down upon the cowering woman, "soften your heart to pity, not revenge? Our affections are not our own; we are not masters of these but by many a hard struggle. I never could have loved you more than as a sister: it was not pride, Mary; we have none of that with those we love. I loved you very truly for your own sake, for the sake of our happy days of childhood together, and for my mother's sake." As the last words fell from him, the man, for a moment spirit-broken and agonized, sunk down on a chair, and, leaning his head on his arm across the table, wept like any woman over the ruin before him, and his memory of another. He had not one selfish thought; he was iron for himself,--for others, as a child at heart in love and gentleness. She rose, and, creeping to his side, took the hand which, clenched in its agony, rested on his knee, and, dropping on hers, she covered it with tears and kisses. "Forgive me, Miles," she sobbed, "for you know not all I endured of trial before I fell. He told me you had scoffed at my love--to him. It was not the work of a day or hour; it is nearly eight long years since you quitted this place; for more than four we have not met; for less than that space I have been the guilty creature I now am!"