"I cannot and I will not bear this!" exclaimed Vivian, starting up. "I
have laid my heart bare before you, and it is ungenerous and unmanly
thus to press upon its wounds. You can moralize, you can speak coldly;
but--I--I loved!"

"And do you think," I burst forth, "do you think that I did not love
too,--love longer than you have done; better than you have done; gone
through sharper struggles, darker days, more sleepless nights than you;
and yet--"

Vivian caught hold of me.

"Hush!" he cried; "is this indeed true? I thought you might have had
some faint and fleeting fancy for Miss Trevanion, but that you curbed
and conquered it at once. Oh, no! It was impossible to have loved
really, and to have surrendered all chance as you did,--have left the
house, have fled from her presence! No, no; that was not love!"

"It was love! And I pray Heaven to grant that, one day, you may know
how little your affection sprang from those feelings which make true
love sublime as honor, and meek as is religion! Oh, cousin, cousin,
with those rare gifts, what you might have been; what, if you will pass
through repentance and cling to atonement, what, I dare hope, you may
yet be! Talk not now of your love; I talk not of mine! Love is a thing
gone from the lives of both. Go back to earlier thoughts, to heavier
wrongs,--your father, that noble heart which you have so wantonly
lacerated, which you have so little comprehended!"

Then, with all the warmth of emotion, I hurried on,--showed him the true
nature of honor and of Roland (for the names were one!); showed him the