Lord Henry Mertoun has fallen in love with Mildred Tresham.  His estates adjoin those of Earl Tresham, her brother and guardian.  He inherits a noble name, and an unsullied reputation; and need only offer himself to be accepted.  But the youthful reverence which he entertains for Lord Tresham makes him shrink from preferring his suit; and he allows himself and Mildred to drift into a secret intimacy, which begins in all innocence, but does not end so.  Then his shyness vanishes.  He seeks an interview with the Earl, and obtains his joyful consent to the union.  All seems to be going well.  But Mildred’s awakened womanhood takes the form of an overpowering remorse and shame; and these become the indirect cause of the catastrophe.

Gerard, an old retainer of the family, has witnessed Lord Mertoun’s nightly visits to the castle; and, amidst a bitter conflict of feeling, he tells the Earl what he has seen.  Tresham summons his sister.  He is writhing under the sense of outraged family honour; but a still stronger fraternal affection commends the culprit to his mercy.  He assists her confession with touching delicacy and tenderness; shows himself prepared to share her shame, to help her to live it through—­to marry her to the man she loves.  He insists only upon this, that Mertoun shall not be deceived:  and that she shall cancel the promise of an interview which she has given him for the following day.

Mildred tacitly owns her guilt, and invokes any punishment her brother may adjudge to it; but she will not betray her lover by confessing his name, and she will not forbid Mertoun to come.  The Earl’s mind does not connect the two.  No extenuating circumstance suggests itself.  He has loved his young sister with a chivalrous admiration and trust; and he is one of those men to whom a blot in the ’scutcheon is only less terrible than the knowledge that such trust has been misplaced.  He is stung to madness by what seems this crowning proof of his sister’s depravity; and by the thought of him who has thus corrupted her.  He surprises Mertoun on the way to the last stolen visit to his love; and, before there has been time for an explanation, challenges and kills him.

The reaction of feeling begins when he perceives that Mertoun has allowed himself to be killed.  Remorse and sorrow deepen into despair as the dying youth gasps out the story of his constant love, of his boyish error—­of his manly desire of reparation; above all, as he reminds his hearer of the sister whose happiness he has slain; and asks if he has done right to set his “thoughtless foot” upon them both, and say as they perish—­

“...  Had I thought,
’All had gone otherwise’....”
(vol iv. p. 59.)