blame the writer. I was suffered to run my eyes over it, and was
ashamed. It read to me too palpably as an outcry to delude and draw her
hither:--pathos and pathos: the father holding his dying son in his arms,
his sole son, Harry Richmond; the son set upon by enemies in the night:
the lover never daring to beg for a sight of his beloved ere he passed
away:--not an ill-worded letter; read uncritically, it may have been
touching: it must have been, though it was the reverse for me.
I frowned, broke down in regrets, under sharp humiliation.

She said, 'You knew nothing of it. A little transgression is the real
offender. When we are once out of the way traced for us, we are in
danger of offending at every step; we are as lawless as the outcasts.'
That meant, 'My turning aside to you originally was the blameable thing.'
It might mean, 'My love of you sets my ideas of duty at variance with my
father's.'

She smiled; nothing was uttered in a tone of despondency. Her high
courage and breeding gave her even in this pitfall the smoothness which
most women keep for society. Why she had not sent me any message or
tidings of herself to Riversley was not a matter that she could imagine
to perplex me: she could not imagine my losing faith in her. The least
we could do, I construed it, the religious bond between us was a faith in
one another that should sanctify to our souls the external injuries it
caused us to commit. But she talked in no such strain. Her delight in
treading English ground was her happy theme. She said, 'It is as young
as when we met in the forest'; namely, the feeling revived for England.
How far off we were from the green Devonshire coast, was one of her
questions, suggestive of our old yacht-voyage lying among her dreams.
Excepting an extreme and terrorizing paleness, there was little to fever
me with the thought that she suffered mortally. Of reproach, not a word;