load of years were lifted from his bosom. The
joyous, divine elasticity of spirit, that in the morning of life springs
towards the Future as a bird soars into heaven, pervaded his whole sense
of being. A Greek poet implies that the height of bliss is the sudden
relief of pain: there is a nobler bliss still,--the rapture of the
conscience at the sudden release from a guilty thought. By the bedside
at which he had knelt in boyhood, Harley paused to kneel once more. The
luxury of prayer, interrupted since he had nourished schemes of which
his passions had blinded him to the sin, but which, nevertheless, he
dared not confess to the All-Merciful, was restored to him. And yet,
as he bowed his knee, the elation of spirits he had before felt forsook
him. The sense of the danger his soul had escaped, the full knowledge of
the guilt to which the fiend had tempted, came dread before his clearing
vision; he shuddered in horror of himself. And he who but a few hours
before had deemed it so impossible to pardon his fellow-man, now felt
as if years of useful and beneficent deeds could alone purify his own
repentant soul from the memory of one hateful passion.

CHAPTER XXXII

But while Harley had thus occupied the hours of night with cares for the
living, Audley Egerton had been in commune with the dead. He had taken
from the pile of papers amidst which it had fallen, the record of Nora's
silenced heart. With a sad wonder he saw how he had once been loved.
What had all which successful ambition had bestowed on the lonely
statesman to compensate for the glorious empire he had lost,--such
realms of lovely fancy; such worlds of exquisite emotion; that infinite
which lies within the divine sphere that unites spiritual genius with
human love? His own positive and earthly nature attained, for the
first time, and as if for its own punishment, the comprehension of that
loftier and more ethereal visitant from the heavens, who had once looked
with a seraph's smile through the prison-bars of his iron life; that
celestial refinement of affection, that exuberance of feeling which
warms into such varieties of beautiful idea, under the breath of the
earth-beautifier, Imagination,--all from which, when it was all his own,
he had turned half weary and impatient, and termed the exaggerations
of a visionary romance, now that the world had lost them evermore, he
interpreted aright as truths. Truths they were, although illusions. Even
as the philos