affection with disdain.

In the midst of this, I turned and beheld, within hearing, a figure
which I knew upon the moment. O Heaven! the burning shame and agony
of that glance! It raised its mask--I saw that blanched cheek, and
that trembling lip! I knew that the iron had indeed entered into her
soul.

Clarence, I never beheld her again alive. Within a week from that
time she was a corpse. She had borne much, suffered much, and
murmured not; but this shock pressed too hard, came too home, and from
the hand of him for whom she would have sacrificed all! I stood by
her in death; I beheld my work; and I turned away, a wanderer and a
pilgrim upon the face of the earth. Verily, I have had my reward.

The old man paused, in great emotion; and Clarence, who could offer
him no consolation, did not break the silence. In a few minutes
Talbot continued--

From that time the smile of woman was nothing to me: I seemed to grow
old in a single day. Life lost to me all its objects. A dreary and
desert blank stretched itself before me: the sounds of creation had
only in my ears one voice; the past, the future, one image. I left my
country for twenty years, and lived an idle and hopeless man in the
various courts of the Continent.

At the age of fifty I returned to England; the wounds of the past had
not disappeared, but they were scarred over; and I longed, like the
rest of my species, to have an object in view. At that age, if we
have seen much of mankind and possess the talents to profit by our