The statesman received these acknowledgments at first with well-feigned surprise, and then with an affectation of frank cordiality.  The tears began already to start from Lucy’s blue eyes at viewing this unexpected and moving scene.  To see the Master, late so haughty and reserved, and whom she had always supposed the injured person, supplicating her father for forgiveness, was a change at once surprising, flattering, and affecting.

“Dry your eyes, Lucy,” said her father; “why should you weep, because your father, though a lawyer, is discovered to be a fair and honourable man?  What have you to thank me for, my dear Master,” he continued, addressing Ravenswood, “that you would not have done in my case?  ’Suum cuique tribuito,’ was the Roman justice, and I learned it when I studied Justinian.  Besides, have you not overpaid me a thousand times, in saving the life of this dear child?”

“Yes,” answered the Master, in all the remorse of self-accusation; “but the little service I did was an act of mere brutal instinct; your defence of my cause, when you knew how ill I thought of you, and how much I was disposed to be your enemy, was an act of generous, manly, and considerate wisdom.”

“Pshaw!” said the Lord Keeper, “each of us acted in his own way; you as a gallant soldier, I as an upright judge and privy-councillor.  We could not, perhaps, have changed parts; at least I should have made a very sorry tauridor, and you, my good Master, though your cause is so excellent, might have pleaded it perhaps worse yourself than I who acted for you before the council.”

“My generous friend!” said Ravenswood; and with that brief word, which the Keeper had often lavished upon him, but which he himself now pronounced for the first time, he gave to his feudal enemy the full confidence of an haughty but honourable heart.  The Master had been remarked among his contemporaries for sense and acuteness, as well as for his reserved, pertinacious, and irascible character.  His prepossessions accordingly, however obstinate, were of a nature to give way before love and gratitude; and the real charms of the daughter, joined to the supposed services of the father, cancelled in his memory the vows of vengeance which he had taken so deeply on the eve of his father’s funeral.  But they had been heard and registered in the book of fate.

Caleb was present at this extraordinary scene, and he could conceive no other reason for a proceeding so extraordinary than an alliance betwixt the houses, and Ravenswood Castle assigned for the young lady’s dowry.  As for Lucy, when Ravenswood uttered the most passionate excuses for his ungrateful negligence, she could but smile through her tears, and, as she abandoned her hand to him, assure him, in broken accents, of the delight with which she beheld the complete reconciliation between her father and her deliverer.  Even the statesman was moved and affected by the fiery, unreserved, and generous self-abandonment with which