her the wealth of your love, which she must now bid you take back, and waste no more on one who bears her blighted name! Oh, look not so strangely, my beloved! Only tell me here, in this same spot where we first looked upon each other's face, and exchanged our vows of love, that you forgive me for the sorrow I cause you; for indeed, indeed it was in ignorance I let you love me, and it has been in the sweetness of our mutual love that I have so utterly forgotten the shadow, as never once to have recalled it to mind till now, when its bitter meaning has been thus rudely revealed to me! Would I had not made so light of it to my mother, but my love had indeed so wholly chased away its pain! Percival, you suffer, my beloved, and I must with ruthless hand inflict the bitter pain! But see--I am strong--I speak calmly! Perchance my heart is already broken, and I am dead to its pain. Percival, Percival, speak to me!" As the meaning of her words gradually forced itself into his unwilling brain, the young chaplain's face had grown whiter and whiter, and seemed turning into very stone before her eyes, in the misery which, with iron hand, he was controlling until he had heard all. "Sweetheart," he answered, with the sudden, desperate eagerness of a drowning man catching at a straw, "this cannot be! The shock of your new knowledge, and the illness it has brought upon you, has over-wrought your nerves, and caused you to attach to those passing clouds of temptation or depression, of which you speak, and which haunt us all betimes, a meaning with which there is no need, no reason to clothe them! I pray you, an you love me, suffer my devotion to chase them for ever from this fair mind, which, God forbid, should dwell to its hurt upon this past sad history! Shanno, Shanno, I will not believe that your sweet life must be darkened by this evil from which you have been so tenderly shielded! It is not without much thought upon the matter that I have asked for your love, and looked forward to a life with you, in which the curse shall be undone for ever! Can you not trust that in the deep study I have ever given to this matter, and in the far stronger confidence we all place in the yet more learned studies of our beloved physician, I could not have blinded my eyes to aught of ill that might in the future befall you and yours? I am satisfied, my darling, that all shall be well, and would bid you in this matter rest on Rhiwallon's judgment, if love itself bid you fear to rest on mine own, and to wait patiently, as I will likewise wait, till this passing shadow of doubt shall have rolled away."