the desert and the grave!"

"Speak not so, Ernest," said Lord Vargrave, soothingly; "a little while,
and you will recover this blow: your control over passion has, even in
youth, inspired me with admiration and surprise; and now, in calmer
years, and with such incentives to self-mastery, your triumph will come
sooner than you think. Evelyn, too, is so young; she has not known you
long; perhaps her love, after all, is that caused by some mystic, but
innocent working of nature, and she would rejoice to call you 'father.'
Happy years are yet in store for you."

Maltravers did not listen to these vain and hollow consolations. With
his head drooping on his bosom, his whole form unnerved, the large tears
rolling unheeded down his cheeks, he seemed the very picture of a
broken-hearted man, whom fate never again could raise from despair. He,
who had, for years, so cased himself in pride, on whose very front was
engraved the victory over passion and misfortune, whose step had trod the
earth in the royalty of the conqueror; the veriest slave that crawls bore
not a spirit more humbled, fallen, or subdued! He who had looked with
haughty eyes on the infirmities of others, who had disdained to serve his
race because of their human follies and partial frailties,--_he_, even
_he_, the Pharisee of Genius,--had but escaped by a chance, and by the
hand of the man he suspected and despised, from a crime at which nature
herself recoils,--which all law, social and divine, stigmatizes as
inexpiable, which the sternest imagination of the very heathen had
invented as the gloomiest catastrophe that can befall the wisdom and the
pride of mortals! But one step farther, and the fabulous OEdipus had not
been more accursed!

Such thoughts as these, unformed, confused, but strong enough to bow him