o quench ever since I knew
it."

"Why?" I went on. "You need not hold back on Eustace's account. I am
quite sure nothing would make her accept him, and I am equally
convinced--"

"Hush, Lucy!" he said in a scarcely audible voice. "It is profanation.
Remember--"

"But all that is over," I said. "Things that happened when you were a
mere boy, and knew no better, do not seem to belong to you now."

"Sometimes they do not," he said sadly; "but--"

"What is repented," I began, but he interrupted.

"The fact is not changed. It is not fit that the purest, gentlest,
brightest creature made by Heaven should be named in the same day with
one stained with blood--aye, and deeds I could not speak of to you."

I could not keep from crying as I said, "If I love you the more, Harry,
would not she?"

"See here, Lucy," said Harry, standing still with his hand on my rein;
"you don't know what you do in trying to inflame what I can hardly keep
down. The sweet little thing may have a fancy for me because I'm the
biggest fellow she knows, and have done a thing or two; but what I am
she knows less than even you do; and would it not be a wicked shame
either to gain the tender heart in ignorance, or to thrust on it the
knowledge and the pain of such a past as mine?" And his groan was very
heavy, so that I cried out:

"Oh, Harry! this is dreadful. Do you give up all hope and joy for ever
because of what you did as an ungovernable boy left to yourself?"

We went on for some time in silence; then he said in an indescribable
tone, between wonder, disgust, and pity, "And I thought I loved Meg
Cree!"

"You knew no one else," I said, feeling as if, when Dora threw away
that ring, the wild, passionate animal man had been exorcised; but all
the answer I had was another groan, as from the burthened breast, as if
he felt it almost an outrage to one whom he so reverenced to transfer
to her the heart that had once beat for Meg Cree. There was no more
speech for a long time, during which I feared that I had merely made
him unhappy by communicating my conjecture, but just as we were
reaching our own grounds he said, "You will say nothing, Lucy?"

"No, indeed."

"I thought it was all over, and for ever," he said, pausing; "it ought
to have been. But the gates of a new world were opened to me when I
saw her and you walking in the garden! If it had only been five or six
years sooner!"

He could not say any more, for Dora, who had been