passionate despair. Vainly she tried to utter the feelings that crowded
upon her!--vainly, vainly! Woman can murmur, "I have injured you--
forgive!" when she cannot exclaim, "You disdain me, but love!" Vainly,
vainly her bosom heaved and her lips moved under the awe of his flashing
eyes and the grandeur of his indignant frown.

"Ah!" he resumed, pursuing his own thoughts with a sombre intensity of
passion that rendered him almost unconscious of her presence--"Ah! I said
to myself, 'Oh, she believes that she has been so mourned and missed that
my soul would spring back to her false smile; that I could be so base a
slave to my senses as to pardon the traitress because her face was fair
enough to haunt my dreams. She dupes herself; she is no necessity to my
existence--I have wrenched it from her power years, long years ago! I
will show her, since again she deigns to remember me, that I am not so
old as to be grateful for the leavings of a heart.

"I will love another--I will be beloved. She shall not say with secret
triumph, 'The old man dotes in rejecting me'"

"Darrell, Darrel--unjus--cruel kill me rather than talk thus!"

He heeded not her cry. His words rolled on in that wonderful, varying
music which, whether in tenderness or in wrath, gave to his voice a
magical power--fascinating, hushing, overmastering human souls.

"But--you have the triumph; see, I am still alone! I sought the world of
the young--the marriage mart of the Beautiful once more. Alas! if my
eye was captured for a moment, it was by something that reminded me of
you. I saw a faultless face, radiant with its virgin blush; moved to it,
I drew near-sighing, turned away; it was not you! I heard the silvery