, rash and
blind, have you committed your happiness into my keeping? You were
warned, and yet you hastened to your doom."

"Because I believed that you loved me; because I loved and trusted, with
a love and faith more deep and strong than woman ever knew."

"And I have destroyed them. I knew it would be so. I knew that I would
prove a faithless guardian to a charge too dear. Gabriella, I am a
wretch,--deserving your hatred and indignation. I have insulted your
innocence, by suspicions I should blush to admit. Love, too strong for
reason, converts me at times into a madman. I do not ask you to forgive
me; but if you could conceive of the agonies I endure, you would pity
me, were I your direst foe."

Remorse, sorrow, tenderness, and love, all swept over his countenance,
and gave pathos to his voice. I rose and sprang to his arms, that opened
to receive me, and I clung to his neck, and wept upon his bosom, till it
seemed that my life would dissolve itself in tears. Oh! it seemed that I
had leaped over a yawning abyss to reach him, that I had found him just
as I was losing him for ever. I was once more in the banqueting-house of
joy, and "his banner over me was love."

"Never again, my husband, never close your heart against me. I have no
other home, no other refuge, no other world, than your arms."

"You have forgiven me too soon, my Gabriella. You should impose upon me
some penalty equal to the offence, if such indeed there be. Oh! most
willingly would I cut off the hand so tenderly clasped in yours and cast
it into the flames, if by so doing I could destroy the fiend who tempts
me to suspect fidelity, worthy of eternal trust. You think I give myself
up without a struggle to the demon passion, in whose grasp you have seen
me writhing; but you know not, dream not, how I wrestle with it in
secret, and what prayers I send up to God for deliverance. It seems
impossible now that I should ever doubt, ever wrong you again, and yet I
dare not promise. Oh! I dare not promise; for when the whirlwind of
passion rises, I know not what I do."

Had I not been conscious that I was concealing something from him, that
while he was restoring to me his confidence, I was deceiving him, I
should have been perfectly happy in this hour of reconciliation. But as
he again and again clasped me to his bosom, and lavished upon me the
tenderest caresses, I involuntarily shrunk from the pressure, lest he
should feel the note, which seemed to flu