she felt; and the outlaw, growing impatient of the dumb spectacle, now ventured to approach and interrupt her.  She rose, meekly and without reluctance, as he spoke; with a manner which said as plainly as words could have, said—­’Command, and I obey.  Bid me go even now, at midnight, on a perilous journey, over and into foreign lands, and I go without murmur or repining.’  She was a heart-stricken, a heart-broken, and abused woman—­and yet she loved still, and loved her destroyer.

“Ellen,” said he, taking her hand, “your mother was a Christian—­a strict worshipper—­one who, for the last few years of her life, seldom put the Bible out of her hands; and yet she cursed me in her very soul as she went out of the world.”

“Guy, Guy, speak not so, I pray you.  Spare me this cruelty, and say not for the departed spirit what it surely never would have said of itself.”

“But it did so say, Ellen, and of this I am satisfied.  Hear me, girl.  I know something of mankind, and womankind too, and I am not often mistaken in the expression of human faces, and certainly was not mistaken in hers.  When, in the last paroxysm, you knelt beside her with your head down upon her hand and in her grasp, and as I approached her, her eyes, which feebly threw up the film then rapidly closing over them, shot out a most angry glare of hatred and reproof; while her lips parted—­I could see, though she could articulate no word—­with involutions which indicated the curse that she could not speak.”

“Think not so, I pray you.  She had much cause to curse, and often would she have done so, but for my sake she did not.  She would call me a poor fool, that so loved the one who had brought misery and shame to all of us; but her malediction was arrested, and she said it not.  Oh, no! she forgave you—­I know she did—­heard you not the words which she uttered at the last?”

“Yes, yes—­but no matter.  We must now talk of other things, Ellen; and first of all, you must know, then, I am about to be married.”

Had a bolt from the crossbow at that moment penetrated into her heart, the person he addressed could not have been more transfixed than at this speech.  She started—­an inquiring and tearful doubt rose into her eyes, as they settled piercingly upon his own; but the information they met with there needed no further word of assurance from his lips.  He was a stern tyrant—­one, however, who did not trifle.

“I feared as much, Guy—­I have had thoughts which as good as told me this long before.  The silent form before me has said to me, over and over again, you would never wed her whom you have dishonored.  Oh, fool that I was!—­spite of her forebodings and my own, I thought—­I still think, and oh, Guy, let me not think in vain—­that there would be a time when you would take away the reproach from my name and the sin from my soul, by making me your wife, as you have so often promised.”

“You have indeed thought like a child, Ellen, if you suppose that, situated as I am, I could ever marry simply because I loved.”