mbled under the pitiless weight of thoughts, the sad lines of
discussion and argument and doubt, which were entangled in its branches!
Gerald Wentworth went to his window to refer to it, as if it were a book
in which all his contests had been recorded. The thrill of the air in it
tingled through him as he stood looking out; and there, without looking
at Frank, except now and then for a moment when he got excited with his
subject, he went into the history of his struggle--a history not
unprecedented or unparalleled, such as has been told to the world before
now by men who have gone through it, in various shapes, with various
amounts of sophistry and simplicity. But it is a different thing reading
of such a conflict in a book, and hearing it from lips pallid with the
meaning of the words they uttered, and a heart which was about to prove
its sincerity by voluntary pangs more hard than death. Frank Wentworth
listened to his brother with a great deal of agreement in what he said,
and again with an acute perception of mistakes on Gerald's part, and
vehement impulses of contradiction, to which, at the same time, it was
impossible to give utterance; for there was something very solemn in the
account he was giving of himself, as he stood with his face half turned
to the anxious listener, leaning on the window, looking into the cedar.
Gerald did not leave any room for argument or remonstrance; he told his
brother how he had been led from one step to another, without any
lingering touch of possibility in the narrative that he might be
induced to retrace again that painful way. It was a path, once trod,
never to be returned upon; and already he stood steadfast at the end,
looking back mournfully, yet with a strange composure. It would be
impossible to describe the mixture of love, admiration, impatience--even
intolerance--which swelled through the mind of the spectator as he
looked on at this wonderful sight, nor how hard he found it to restrain
the interruptions which rushed to his lips, the eager arguments which
came upon him in a flood, all his own favourite fences against the
overflow of the tide which ran in lawful bounds in his own mind, but
which had inundated his brother's. But though it was next to impossible
to keep silence, it was altogether impossible to break in upon Gerald's
history of this great battle through which he had just come. He _had_
come through it, it was plain; the warfare was accomplished, the weapons
hun