lot, she can never share it. My punishment is fixed,--it is worse than a
death of shame; it is a life without hope! Every moment I feel, and
shall feel to the last, the pressure of a chain that may never be broken
or loosened! And yet, fool that I am! I cannot leave this country
without seeing her again, without telling her that I have really looked
my last. But have I not twice told her that? Strange fatality! But
twice have I spoken to her of love, and each time it was to tear myself
from her at the moment of my confession. And even now something that I
have no power to resist compels me to the same idle and weak indulgence.
Does destiny urge me? Ay, perhaps to my destruction! Every hour a
thousand deaths encompass me. I have now obtained all for which I seemed
to linger. I have won, by a new crime, enough to bear me to another
land, and to provide me there a soldier's destiny. I should not lose an
hour in flight, yet I rush into the nest of my enemies, only for one
unavailing word with her; and this, too, after I have already bade her
farewell! Is this fate? If it be so, what matters it? I no longer care
for a life which, after all, I should reform in vain if I could not
reform it for her; yet--yet, selfish and lost that I am! will it be
nothing to think hereafter that I have redeemed her from the disgrace of
having loved an outcast and a felon? If I can obtain honour, will it
not, in my own heart at least,--will it not reflect, however dimly and
distantly, upon her?"

Such, bewildered, unsatisfactory, yet still steeped in the colours of
that true love which raises even the lowest, were the midnight
meditations of Clifford; they terminated, towards the morning, in an
uneasy and fitful slumber. From this he was awakened by a loud yawn from
the throat of Long Ned, who was always the earliest riser of his set.

"Hullo!" said he, "it is almost daybreak; and if we want to cash our