childish affection for him free from the growth into that warm love which
would have been guilt if so encouraged, she felt the more free to
volunteer the atonement which might permit her to dedicate herself to his
remaining years. Thus, one day, after a conversation with Alban Morley,
in which Alban had spoken of Darrell as the friend, almost the virtual
guardian, of her infancy; and, alluding to a few lines just received from
him, brought vividly before Caroline the picture of Darrell's melancholy
wanderings and blighted life,--thus had she, on the impulse of the
moment, written the letter which had reached Darrell at Malta. In it she
referred but indirectly to the deceit that had been practised on herself
--far too delicate to retail a scandal which she felt to be an insult to
his dignity, in which, too, the deceiving parties were his daughter's
husband and her own mother. No doubt every true woman can understand why
she thus wrote to Darrell, and every true man can equally comprehend why
that letter failed in its object, and was returned to her in scorn. Hers
was the yearning of meek, passionless affection, and his the rebuke of
sensitive, embittered indignant love.

But now, as all her past, with its interior life, glided before her, by a
grief the most intolerable she had yet known, the woman became aware that
it was no longer penitence for the injured friend--it was despair for the
lover she had lost. In that stormy interview, out of all the confused
and struggling elements of her life--long self-reproach, LOVE--the love
of woman--had flashed suddenly, luminously, as the love of youth at first
sight. Strange--but the very disparity of years seemed gone! She, the
matured, sorrowful woman, was so much nearer to the man, still young in
heart and little changed in person, than the gay girl of seventeen had
been to the grave friend of forty! Strange, but those vehement
reproaches had wakened emotions deeper in the core of the wild mortal
breast than all that early chivalrous homage which had exalted her into