y
merit your wrath and malediction. But oh! in pity do not deny me your
forgiveness, for I have drunk deep of sorrow; if my guilt has been
great, so have likewise been the tortures that have rent the heart of
your child, since the moment of her first transgression."

"Unfold to me those horrors," exclaimed the desolate father, in a
frantic tone; "perhaps their disclosure may break my heart, and bestow
on me the only comfort I can now expect--yes, speak, and let the last
words I hear from my daughter be my passport to the tomb!"

"Father, speak not thus--on me alone let the vengeance of the offended
heavens fall--I alone must expiate the guilt, for shame cannot be joined
with the name of Monteblanco; but you, oh! father, live--live to support
the dignity of that name."

"You have disgraced it," interrupted Don Manuel, "but I will hear
tranquilly--ere I deeply curse, I will deliberately examine the extent
of your guilt."

He seemed suddenly to acquire a dreadful composure, and Theodora, as
soon as her emotion would permit, told in the strains of deepest woe the
particulars of her sorrowful history. It was interrupted repeatedly by
her disconsolate father: rage, pride, pity, and resentment, by turns
swelled his breast, according as the circumstances related excited those
different feelings. But when the harrowing recital was finished, his
character seemed to assume a tone of energy uncongenial with his present
state of malady. Family pride, a sense of degradation and of injury
unrevenged, rose paramount in his mind, and stifling for the moment all
the pleadings of pity and parental tenderness, he felt an equal degree
of horror and resentment against the betrayer and his unfortunate
victim.

In the first impulse, therefore, of his rage, Monteblanco fixed his
despairing eyes on his daughter, and in a tone of bitterness, enough to
break the fibres of her heart, he cried out imperiously--

"Begone from my sight for ever--begone, and let me die in peace--let me
descend to my grave without the additional pang which the presence of an
ungrateful child inflicts upon me--rise and begone; and may the stings
you have planted in this withered heart, and the shame you have heaped
on my head, be your companion to the latest moment of your ignominious
life."

"Oh horror! horror!" shrieked Theodora: "Father! father, you do not--you
cannot curse your hapless child. Oh! my expiation has been
boundless--the justice of Heaven itself