replied Lord Sherbrooke, "you speak well and wisely,
but coldly too. You can easily resign the man that you once loved. It
costs you but little to give him over to his own course; to afford
him no solace, no consolation, no advice; to deprive him of that
communication, which, distant as it was, might have saved him from
many an error. It costs you nothing to pronounce such words as you
have spoken, and to sever our fate for ever."
"It is you that sever it," she replied, in a sad and reproachful
tone. "Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, you do me wrong--you know you do me
wrong--Oh, how great wrong! Do you think I have shed no tears? Do you
think my heart has not been wrung? Do you think my hours have not
passed in anguish, my days in sadness, and my nights in weeping? Oh,
Sherbrooke, since you left me, what has been my fate? To watch for
some weeks the death-bed of a father, from whose mind the light had
already departed; to sorrow over his tomb; to watch the long days for
the coming of my husband--of the husband whom all had doubted, all
had condemned, but my own weak heart, whose vows of amendment I had
believed, to whose entreaties I had yielded, even to that rashest of
all acts, a secret marriage; to find him delay his coming from day to
day, and to see the sun that rose upon me in solitary sadness go down
in grief; to lose the hope that cheered me; to look for his letters
as the next boon; to read them and to weep over them; to remain in
exile, not only from my native land, but also from him to whom I had
given every feeling of my heart, to whom I had yielded all that a
virtuous woman can yield; to remain in a strange court, to which I
had no longer any tie, in which I had no longer any protector; and
every time I heard his name mentioned, to hear it connected with some
tale of scandal, or stigmatized for some new act of vice; and worse,
worse than all, Sherbrooke, to be sought, idly sought, by men that I
despised, or hated, or was indifferent to, and forbade to say the
words which would have ended their pursuit at once, 'I am already a
wife.' Sherbrooke, you have given me months and months of misery
already. I weep not now, even with the thought of parting from you
for ever; but it is, I believe, that the fountain of my tears is
dried up and exhausted. Oh, Sherbrooke, when first I knew you, who
was so blithe and joyous as myself? and now, what have you made me?"
He was much moved, and was about to speak; but she held up her hand
beseechingly, and said, "Le