“I’ve never doubted, Charles, Heaven or you.  To doubt one would have been, to doubt both.”

“Generous and best of girls, what must you have thought of my enforced absence!  Oh!  Flora, I was unjust enough to your truth to make my greatest pang the thought that you might doubt me, and cast me from your heart for ever.”

“Ah!  Charles, you ought to have known me better.  I stood amid sore temptation to do so much.  There were those who would have urged me on to think that you had cast me from your heart for ever.  There were those ready and willing to place the worst construction upon your conduct, and with a devilish ingenuity to strive to make me participate in such a feeling; but, no, Charles, no—­I loved you, and I trusted you, and I could not so far belie my own judgment as to tell you other than what you always seemed to my young fancy.”

“And you are right, my Flora, right; and is it not a glorious triumph to see that love—­that sentiment of passion—­has enabled you to have so enduring and so noble a confidence in aught human?”

“Ay, Charles, it is the sentiment of passion, for our love has been more a sentiment than a passion.  I would fain think that we had loved each other with an affection not usually known, appreciated, or understood, and so, in the vanity of my best affections, I would strive to think them something exclusive, and beyond the common feelings of humanity.”

“And you are right, my Flora; such love as yours is the exception; there may be preferences, there may be passions, and there may be sentiments, but never, never, surely, was there a heart like yours.”

“Nay, Charles, now you speak from a too poetical fancy; but is it possible that I have had you here so long, with your hand clasped in mine, and asked you not the causes of your absence?”

“Oh, Flora, I have suffered much—­much physically, but more mentally.  It was the thought of you that was at once the bane and the antidote of my existence.”

“Indeed, Charles!  Did I present myself in such contradictory colours to you?”

“Yes, dearest, as thus.  When I thought of you, sometimes, in the deep seclusion of a dungeon, that thought almost goaded me to madness, because it brought with it the conviction—­a conviction peculiar to a lover—­that none could so effectually stand between you and all evil as myself.”

“Yes, yes, Charles; most true.”

“It seemed to me as if all the world in arms could not have protected you so well as this one heart, clad in the triple steel of its affections, could have shielded you from evil.”

“Ay, Charles; and then I was the bane of your existence, because I filled you with apprehension?”

“For a time, dearest; and then came the antidote; for when exhausted alike in mind and body—­when lying helpless, with chains upon my limbs—­when expecting death at every visit of those who had dragged me from light and from liberty, and from love; it was but the thought of thy beauty and thy affection that nerved me, and gave me a hope even amidst the cruellest disaster.”