ings of indignation in him also. "But you have
ever been so. You have driven me, an innocent babe, from your affections
and your sight; and when now, first after long years, I beg a father's
blessing--stretch forth my arm to earn a father's thanks--you spurn me
from your feet, and heap unmerited obloquy upon my head."

"Unmerited!" echoed Lord Clynton. "Do you forget your disobedience? or do
the convenient tenets of your hypocritical party permit you to erase the
fifth commandment from the decalogue, and teach you that the honouring of
your father is an idle observance, not to be weighed in the balance
against the cause of the God of Israel and his people--so goes the
phrase--does it not?"

"I understand you not," said Gerald. "In what have I refused to honour my
father? whose face I see for the first time to-day--at least since I have
thought and memory."

"In what?" exclaimed his father, with a bitter laugh, "said I not so?
Honour and dishonour are in your new-fangled vocabulary but vain words,
that you understand no longer. In what? If I, thy father--since to my
shame I must be so--if I have been led by my overwhelming grief for that
angel, who has long been at rest, to treat thee with wrong in thy
childhood, my conscience has no longer a reproach to offer me; for my son
has in return treated me with the bitterest scorn, and refused to come to
those loving arms, which at last opened to receive him. In what? I have
appealed to thee with the strongest appeal of a father's heart to join me
in the true and joint cause of murdered royalty, and I find thee even now
before me, with arms in thy hands, to aid the sacrilegious traitors to
their king--may be to turn them with parricidal arm against thy father."

"Again I understand you not," repeated Gerald, gazing wistfully in his
face. "Oh speak, explain--my father--this is a mystery to me!"

"Not understand me!" echoed Lord Clynton with scorn--"convenient phrase!
convenient memory! You understood not perhaps those letters I addressed
you, those letters in which I implored you to forget the past, and offered
you a loving welcome to my heart. But you could dictate a letter to your
uncle, in which you could upbraid me for my past unkindness, and refuse
to return. You understood not my urgent appeal to you to join the cause of
truth and loyalty, and fight by your father's side. But you could dictate
a second answer, worded with cold contempt, in which you could assert your
r