at I said; I mistrust myself when I advise her. Her
feelings are truer than all our wisdom!"

Maltravers made no answer, and the curate saw him gliding rapidly away
by the starlit graves towards the village.

CHAPTER VII.

THINK you I can a resolution fetch
From flowery tenderness?--_Measure for Measure_.

THEY were on the road to Dover. Maltravers leaned back in the corner of
the carriage with his hat over his brows, though the morning was yet too
dark for the curate to perceive more than the outline of his features.
Milestone after milestone glided by the wheels, and neither of the
travellers broke the silence. It was a cold, raw morning, and the mists
rose sullenly from the dank hedges and comfortless fields.

Stern and self-accusing was the scrutiny of Maltravers into the recesses
of his conscience, and the blotted pages of the Past. That pale and
solitary mother, mourning over the grave of her--of his own--child, rose
again before his eyes, and seemed silently to ask him for an account
of the heart he had made barren, and of the youth to which his love had
brought the joylessness of age. With the image of Alice,--afar, alone,
whether in her wanderings, a beggar and an outcast, or in that hollow
prosperity, in which the very ease of the frame allowed more leisure
to the pinings of the heart,--with that image, pure, sorrowing, and
faithful from first to last, he compared his own wild and wasted youth,
his resort to fancy and to passion for excitement. He contrasted with
her patient resignation his own arrogant rebellion against the trials,
the bitterness of which his proud spirit had exaggerated; his contempt
for the pursuits and aims of others; the imperious indolence of his
later life, and his forgetfulness of the duties which Providence had
fitted him to discharge. His mind, once so rudely hurled from that
complacent pedestal, from which it had so long looked down on men,
and said, "I am wiser and better than you," became even too acutely
sensitive to its own infirmities; and that desire for Virtue, which
he had ever deeply entertained, made itself more distinctly and loudly
heard amidst the ruins and the silence of his pride.

From the contemplation of the Past, he roused himself to face the
Future. Alice had refused his hand, Alice herself had ratified and
blessed his union with another! Evelyn, so madly loved,--Evelyn might
still be his! No law--from the violation of which, even in thought,
Human