Perdita tried to read his countenance, which he angrily averted.  There was so much of truth and nature in his resentment, that her doubts were dispelled.  Her countenance, which for years had not expressed a feeling unallied to affection, became again radiant and satisfied.  She found it however no easy task to soften and reconcile Raymond.  At first he refused to stay to hear her.  But she would not be put off; secure of his unaltered love, she was willing to undertake any labour, use any entreaty, to dispel his anger.  She obtained an hearing, he sat in haughty silence, but he listened.  She first assured him of her boundless confidence; of this he must be conscious, since but for that she would not seek to detain him.  She enumerated their years of happiness; she brought before him past scenes of intimacy and happiness; she pictured their future life, she mentioned their child—­tears unbidden now filled her eyes.  She tried to disperse them, but they refused to be checked—­her utterance was choaked.  She had not wept before.  Raymond could not resist these signs of distress:  he felt perhaps somewhat ashamed of the part he acted of the injured man, he who was in truth the injurer.  And then he devoutly loved Perdita; the bend of her head, her glossy ringlets, the turn of her form were to him subjects of deep tenderness and admiration; as she spoke, her melodious tones entered his soul; he soon softened towards her, comforting and caressing her, and endeavouring to cheat himself into the belief that he had never wronged her.

Raymond staggered forth from this scene, as a man might do, who had been just put to the torture, and looked forward to when it would be again inflicted.  He had sinned against his own honour, by affirming, swearing to, a direct falsehood; true this he had palmed on a woman, and it might therefore be deemed less base—­by others—­not by him;—­for whom had he deceived?—­his own trusting, devoted, affectionate Perdita, whose generous belief galled him doubly, when he remembered the parade of innocence with which it had been exacted.  The mind of Raymond was not so rough cast, nor had been so rudely handled, in the circumstance of life, as to make him proof to these considerations—­on the contrary, he was all nerve; his spirit was as a pure fire, which fades and shrinks from every contagion of foul atmosphere:  but now the contagion had become incorporated with its essence, and the change was the more painful.  Truth and falsehood, love and hate lost their eternal boundaries, heaven rushed in to mingle with hell; while his sensitive mind, turned to a field for such battle, was stung to madness.  He heartily despised himself, he was angry with Perdita, and the idea of Evadne was attended by all that was hideous and cruel.  His passions, always his masters, acquired fresh strength, from the long sleep in which love had cradled them, the clinging weight of destiny bent him down; he was goaded, tortured, fiercely impatient