ures whose very luxuriance,
when the atmosphere is once tainted, does but diffuse disease,--even as
the malaria settles not over thin and barren soils, not over wastes that
have been from all time desolate, but over the places in which southern
suns had once ripened delightful gardens, or the sites of cities, in
which the pomp of palaces has passed away.

It was not enough that the friend of his youth, the confidant of his
love, had betrayed his trust,--been the secret and successful rival; not
enough that the woman his boyhood had madly idolized, and all the while
he had sought her traces with pining, remorseful heart-believing she
but eluded his suit from the emulation of a kindred generosity, desiring
rather to sacrifice her own love than to cost to his the sacrifice of
all which youth rashly scorns and the world so highly estimates,--not
enough that all this while her refuge had been the bosom of another.
This was not enough of injury. His whole life had been wasted on a
delusion; his faculties and aims, the wholesome ambition of lofty
minds, had been arrested at the very onset of fair existence; his
heart corroded by a regret for which there was no cause; his conscience
charged with the terror that his wild chase had urged a too tender
victim to the grave, over which he had mourned. What years that might
otherwise have been to himself so serene, to the world so useful, had
been consumed in objectless, barren, melancholy dreams! And all this
while to whom had his complaints been uttered?--to the man who knew
that his remorse was an idle spectre and his faithful sorrow a mocking
self-deceit. Every thought that could gall man's natural pride, every
remembrance that could sting into revenge a heart that had loved too
deeply not to be accessible to hate, conspired to goad those maddening
Furies who come into every temple which is once desecrated by the
presence of the evil passions. In that sullen silence of the soul,
vengeance took the form of justice. Changed though his feelings towards
Leonora Avenel were, the story of her grief and her wrongs embittered
still more his wrath against his rival. The fragments of her memoir left
naturally on Harley's mind the conviction that she had been the victim
of an infamous fraud, the dupe of a false marriage. His idol had not
only been stolen from the altar,--it had been sullied by the sacrifice;
broken with remorseless hand, and thrust into dishonoured clay;
mutilated, defamed;