ad seen me painting on a former occasion,--the Cornish
cousin, whose beauty he professed to hold so cheaply. More he should
know of her on my return; but at present I confided her to his honour,
and begged he would prove his friendship for me by rendering her
whatever attention she might require in her humble abode. With these
hurried injunctions he promised to comply; and it has often occurred to
me since, although I did not remark it at the time, that while his
voice and manner were calm, there was a burning glow upon his handsome
cheek, and a suppressed exultation in his eye, that I had never
observed on either before. I then quitted the room; and hastening to my
company with a gloom on--my brow that indicated the wretchedness of my
inward spirit, was soon afterwards on the march from ----."

Again the warrior seemed agitated with the most violent emotion; he
buried his face in his hands; and the silence that ensued was longer
than any he had previously indulged in. At length he made an effort to
arouse himself; and again exhibiting his swarthy features, disclosed a
brow, not clouded, as before, by grief, but animated with the fiercest
and most appalling passions, while he thus impetuously resumed.

CHAPTER XI.

"If, hitherto, Clara de Haldimar, I have been minute in the detail of
all that attended my connection with your mother, it has been with a
view to prove to you how deeply I have been injured; but I have now
arrived at a part of my history, when to linger on the past would goad
me into madness, and render me unfit for the purpose to which I have
devoted myself. Brief must be the probing of wounds, that nearly five
lustres have been insufficient to heal; brief the tale that reveals the
infamy of those who have given you birth, and the utter blighting of
the fairest hopes of one whose only fault was that of loving, "not too
wisely, but too well."

"Will you credit the monstrous truth," he added, in a fierce but
composed whisper, while he bent eagerly over the form of the trembling
yet attentive girl, "when I tell you that, on my return from that fatal
expedition, during my continuance on which her image had never once
been absent from my mind, I found Clara Beverley the wife of De
Haldimar? Yes," continued Wacousta, his wounded feeling and mortified
pride chafing, by the bitter recollection, into increasing fury, while
his countenance paled in its swarthiness, "the wife, the wedded wife of
yon false an