her farewell, the same self-accusing language was recurred to, the same
dark hints and allusions to infamy or guilt; yet never till now had she
interpreted them rigidly, and never till now had she dreamed how far
their meaning could extend. Still, what crimes could he have committed?
The true ones never occurred to Lucy. She shuddered to ask herself, and
hushed her doubts in a gloomy and torpid silence. But through all her
accusations against herself, and through all her awakened suspicions
against Clifford, she could not but acknowledge that something noble and
not unworthy of her mingled in his conduct, and occasioned his resistance
to her and to himself; and this belief, perhaps, irritated even while it
touched her, and kept her feelings in a perpetual struggle and conflict
which her delicate frame and soft mind were little able to endure. When
the nerves once break, how breaks the character with them! How many
ascetics, withered and soured, do we meet in the world, who but for one
shock to the heart and form might have erred on the side of meekness!
Whether it come from woe or disease, the stroke which mars a single fibre
plays strange havoc with the mind. Slaves we are to our muscles, and
puppets to the spring of the capricious blood; and the great soul, with
all its capacities, its solemn attributes, and sounding claims, is, while
on earth, but a jest to this mountebank,--the body,--from the dream which
toys with it for an hour, to the lunacy which shivers it into a
driveller, laughing as it plays with its own fragments, and reeling
benighted and blinded to the grave!

We have before said that Lucy was fond both of her uncle and his society;
and still, whenever the subject of Lord Mauleverer and his suit was left
untouched, there was that in the conversation of Sir William Brandon
which aroused an interest in her mind, engrossed and self-consuming as it
had become. Sorrow, indeed, and sorrow's companion, reflection, made her
more and more capable of comprehending a very subtle and intricate