“Not to upbraid, but to forgive, and to imprint upon thy brow the seal of reconciliation, as I now, by this token, vow to thee an everlasting love.”  So saying, Holden bent down, and his lips touched the forehead of Armstrong.

We do not know that we ought to be surprised at anything in the conduct of this extraordinary man.  The principles by which he regulated himself, if he had any that were fixed and determinate, and was not impelled to his actions by the impulse of the moment, were so different from those of other men, that it is difficult to reduce them to the same standard, or, indeed, to assign them to any standard.  Be it as it may, so accustomed was Mr. Armstrong to his ways, that so singular a thing did not impress him as strange.  He only looked up with eyes dimmed with tears, and, in broken accents, thanked the Solitary.

The rest of the time spent by Armstrong on the island, was passed in conversation of very much the same description.  It would seem from his self-reproaches and confessions, that during the lives of his wife and son, the melancholy death of his brother had made no great impression upon him.  Happy in a woman he adored, and who returned his affection; with a blooming family around him; immersed in thoughts of business; and in the enjoyment of a large fortune, there seemed nothing wanting to complete his felicity.  He remembered, too, that there had been an instance of insanity in his family, some years before the birth of himself, which had terminated fatally, the cause of which could not be traced, and felt disposed, therefore, with the natural tendency to self-exculpation of the happy, to find the reason for the tragical end of his brother in hereditary infirmity, rather than attach any serious blame to himself for securing the affections of a lady, whom he was assured had never loved another.  But when after a few years of unclouded bliss, first his wife, and then his son, was taken away, all things assumed an altered aspect.  He found himself the last male of his family, his name about to become extinct and forgotten, with only one other being in the world in whose veins ran his blood, and for whose life his paternal solicitude almost daily trembled.  His mind brooded day by day more and more over his misfortunes, which gradually began to wear the form of judgments, the object and result of which must be to erase his hated name from the earth.  As Faith grew up, his anxieties on her account diminished, but that only left him the wider scope to dwell upon wild imaginations and make himself more the subject of his thoughts.  Of a grave and reflective cast of mind, he had even from his early years respected the duties of religion, and now he turned to it for consolation.  But the very sources whence he should have derived comfort and peace were fountains of disquiet.  His diseased mind seemed incapable of appropriating to itself the gentle promises of pardon and acceptance, but trembled at the denunciations of punishment.