apologise,"--slow to say, "I repent"; very--very--very slow indeed to
say, "I forgive"; yet let him once say, "I repent," "I apologise," or "I
forgive," and it was said with his whole heart and soul.

But it must not be supposed that, in authorising Lionel to undertake the
embassy to Waife, or in the anticipation of what might pass between Waife
and himself should the former consent to revisit the old house from which
he had been so scornfully driven, Darrell had altered, or dreamed of
altering, one iota of his resolves against a Union between Lionel and
Sophy. True, Lionel had induced him to say--

"Could it be indisputably proved that no drop of Jasper Losely's blood
were in this girl's veins--that she were the lawful child of honest
parents, however humble--my right to stand between her and yourself would
cease." But a lawyer's experience is less credulous than a lover's hope.
And to Darrell's judgment it was wholly improbable that any honest
parents, however humble, should have yielded their child to a knave like
Jasper, while it was so probable that his own persuasion was well
founded, and that she was Jasper's daughter, though not Matilda's.

The winter evening had closed, George and Darrell were conversing in the
library; the theme, of course, was Waife; and Darrell listened with vivid
interest to George's graphic accounts of the old man's gentle playful
humour--with its vague desultory undercurrents of poetic fancy or subtle
wisdom. But when George turned to speak of Sophy's endearing, lovely
nature, and, though cautiously, to intimate an appeal on her behalf to
Darrell's sense of duty, or susceptibility to kindly emotions, the proud
man's brow be came knit, and his stately air evinced displeasure.
Fortunately, just at a moment when further words might have led to a
permanent coldness between men so disposed to esteem each other, they