As she spoke, her tears--tears from a source how different from that
whence broke the scorching and intolerable agony of his own! fell soft
upon his bended head, and the hands that still convulsively strained
hers. Maltravers looked wildly up into her countenance, and shuddered
as he saw her attempt to smile. He rose abruptly, threw himself into a
chair, and covered his face. He was seeking by a violent effort to
master himself, and it was only by the heaving of his chest, and now and
then a gasp as for breath, that he betrayed the stormy struggle within.

Florence gazed at him a moment in bitter, in almost selfish penitence.
"And this was the man who seemed to me so callous to the softer
sympathies--this was the heart I trampled upon--this the nature I
distrusted!"

She came near him, trembling and with feeble steps--she laid her hand
upon his shoulder, and the fondness of love came over her, and she wound
her arms around him.

"It is our fate--it is my fate," said Maltravers at last, awaking as
from a hideous dream, and in a hollow but calm voice--"we are the things
of destiny, and the wheel has crushed us. It is an awful state of being
this human life!--What is wisdom--virtue--faith to men--piety to
Heaven--all the nurture we bestow on ourselves--all our desire to win a
loftier sphere, when we are thus the tools of the merest chance--the
victims of the pettiest villainy; and our very existence--our very
senses almost, at the mercy of every traitor and every fool!"

There was something in Ernest's voice, as well as in his reflections,
which appeared so unnaturally calm and deep that it startled Florence,