must have bled
over the notoriety given to her, whom he considered as sacred as the
priestess of some holy temple, and whose name was scarcely to be
mentioned but in prayer.

The only comment he made on them was,--

"My mother and Edith will see these."

"I will write and tell them all," I answered; "it will be too painful to
you."

"We will both write," he said; and we did.

"You blame yourself too much," cried he, when he perused my letter.

"You speak too kindly, too leniently of me," said I, after reading his;
"yet I am glad and grateful. Your mother will judge me from the facts,
and nothing that you or I can say will warp or influence her judgment.
She understands so clearly the motives of action,--she reads so closely
your character and mine, I feel that her decision will be as righteous
as the decree of eternal justice. Oh that I were with her now, for my
soul looks to her as an ark of safety. Like the poor weary dove, it
longs to repose its drooping wings and fold them in trembling joy on her
sheltering breast."

I will not speak of the trial, the condemnation, or the agony I felt,
when I learned that my father was doomed to expiate his crime by
solitary confinement for ten long years. Could Ernest have averted this
fate from him, for my sake he would have done it; but the majesty of the
law was supreme, and no individual effort could change its just decree.
My affections were not wounded, for I never could recall his image
without personal repugnance, but my mother's remembrance was associated
with him;--I remembered her dying injunctions,--her prophetic dream. I
thought of the heaven which he had forfeited, the God whose commandments
he had broken, the Saviour whose mercy he had scorned. I wanted to go to
him,--to minister to him in his lonely cell,--to try to rouse him to a
sense of his transgressions,--to lead him to the God he had forsaken,
the Redeemer he had rejected, the heaven from which my mother seemed
stretching her spirit arms to woo him to her embrace.

"My mother dreamed that I drew him from a black abyss," said I to
Ernest; "she dreamed that I was the guardian angel of his soul. Let me
go to him,--let me fulfil my mission. I shudder when I look around me in
these palace walls, and think that a parent groans in yonder dismal
tombs."

"_I_ will go," replied Ernest; "I will tell him your filial wish, and if
I find you can do him good, I will accompany you there."

"I _can_ do him good,-