sping his hand in both
hers, while she looked into his face, she resumed: "I do not say to thee,
'Grieve not to part;' for I know too well thy faith, thy tenderness--thy
heart, so grand and so soft. But I do say, 'Soar above thy grief, and be
more than man for the sake of men!' Yes, Harold, for this last time I
behold thee. I clasp thy hand, I lean on thy heart, I hear its beating,
and I shall go hence without a tear."

"It cannot, it shall not be!" exclaimed Harold, passionately. "Thou
deceivest thyself in the divine passion of the hour: thou canst not
foresee the utterness of the desolation to which thou wouldst doom thy
life. We were betrothed to each other by ties strong as those of the
Church,--over the grave of the dead, under the vault of heaven, in the
form of ancestral faith! The bond cannot be broken. If England demands
me, let England take me with the ties it were unholy, even for her sake,
to rend!"

"Alas, alas!" faltered Edith, while the flush on her cheek sank into
mournful paleness. "It is not as thou sayest. So has thy love sheltered
me from the world--so utter was my youth's ignorance or my heart's
oblivion of the stern laws of man, that when it pleased thee that we
should love each other, I could not believe that that love was sin; and
that it was sin hitherto I will not think;--now it hath become one."

"No, no!" cried Harold; all the eloquence on which thousands had hung,
thrilled and spell-bound, deserting him in that hour of need, and leaving
to him only broken exclamations,--fragments, in each of which has his
heart itself seemed shivered; "no, no,--not sin!--sin only to forsake
thee.--Hush! hush!--This is a dream--wait till we wake! True heart!
noble soul!--I will not part from thee!"

"But I from thee! And rather than thou shouldst be lost for my sake--the
sake of woman--to honour and conscience, and all for which thy sublime
life sprang from the hands of Nature--if not the cloister, may I find the
grave!--Harold, to the last let me be worthy of thee; and feel, at least,
that if not thy wife--that bright, that blessed fate not mine!--still,
remembering Edith, just men may say, 'She would not have dishonoured the
hearth of Harold!'"

"Dost thou know," said the Earl, striving to speak calmly, "dost thou
know that it is not only to resign thee that they demand--that it is to
resign thee, and for another?"

"I know it," said Edith; and two burning tears, despite her strong and
pret