"Oh, pardon, pardon! Wretch, lost wretch though I be, I bow my head to
the curse. Let it fall,--but on me, and on me only; not on your own
heart too."

Fanny burst into tears, sobbing out, "Forgive him, as I do."

Roland did not heed her.

"He thinks that the heart was not shattered before the curse could
come," he said, in a voice so weak as to be scarcely audible. Then,
raising his eyes to heaven, his lips moved as if he prayed inly.
Pausing, he stretched his hands over his son's head, and averting his
face, said, "I revoke the curse. Pray to thy God for pardon."

Perhaps not daring to trust himself further, he then made a violent
effort and hurried from the room.

We followed silently. When we gained the end of the passage, the door
of the room we had left closed with a sullen jar.

As the sound smote on my ear, with it came so terrible a sense of the
solitude upon which that door had closed, so keen and quick an
apprehension of some fearful impulse, suggested by passions so fierce to
a condition so forlorn, that instinctively I stopped, and then hurried
back to the chamber. The lock of the door having been previously
forced, there was no barrier to oppose my entrance. I advanced, and
beheld a spectacle of such agony as can only be conceived by those who
have looked on the grief which takes no fortitude from reason, no
consolation from conscience,--the grief which tells us what would be the
earth were man abandoned to his passions, and the Chance of the atheist