"Did I? no, no, I have no frown for you; but peace, I am not what I ought
to be through this ordeal."

The above narration of Aram's did indeed account to Madeline for much
that had till then remained unexplained; the appearance of Houseman at
Grassdale,--the meeting between him and Aram on the evening she walked
with the latter, and questioned him of his ill-boding visitor; the
frequent abstraction and muttered hints of her lover; and as he had said,
his last declaration of the possible necessity of leaving Grassdale. Nor
was there any thing improbable, though it was rather in accordance with
the unworldly habits, than with the haughty character of Aram, that he
should seek, circumstanced as he was, to silence even the false accuser
of a plausible tale, that might well strike horror and bewilderment into
a man much more, to all seeming, fitted to grapple with the hard and
coarse realities of life, than the moody and secluded scholar. Be that as
it may, though Lester deplored, he did not blame this circumstance, which
after all had not transpired, nor seemed likely to transpire; and he
attributed the prisoner's aversion to enter farther on the matter, to the
natural dislike of so proud a man to refer to his own weakness, and to
dwell upon the manner in which, despite of that weakness, he had been
duped. This story Lester retailed to Walter, and it contributed to throw
a damp and uncertainty over those mixed and unquiet feelings with which
the latter waited for the coming trial. There were many moments when the
young man was tempted to regret that Aram had not escaped a trial which,
if he were proved guilty, would for ever blast the happiness of his
family; and which might, notwithstanding such a verdict, leave on
Walter's own mind an impression of the prisoner's innocence; and an
uneasy consciousness that he, through his investigations, had brought him
to that doom.