'For the sake of justice, if not of mercy,' exclaimed Adeline, 'forbear thus cruelly to accuse yourself. You know that from my own free, unbiassed choice I gave myself to you, and in compliance with my own principles.' 'But who taught you those principles?--who led you to a train of reasoning, so alluring in theory, so pernicious in practice? Had not I, with the heedless vanity of youth, given to the world the crude conceptions of four-and-twenty, you might at this moment have been the idol of a respectable society; and I, equally respected, have been the husband of your heart; while happiness would perhaps have kept the fatal disease at bay, of which anxiety has facilitated the approach.' He was going on: but Adeline, who had till now struggled successfully with her feelings, wound up almost to phrensy at the possibility that anxiety had shortened Glenmurray's life, gave way to a violent paroxysm of sorrow, which, for a while, deprived her of consciousness; and when she recovered she found Berrendale bending over her, while her head lay on Glenmurray's pillow. The sight of Berrendale in a moment roused her to exertion:--his look was so full of anxious tenderness, and she was at that moment so ill disposed to regard it with complacency, that she eagerly declared she was quite recovered, and begged Mr Berrendale would return to bed; and Glenmurray seconding her request, with a deep sigh he departed. 'Poor fellow!' said Glenmurray, 'I wish you had seen his anxiety during your illness!' 'I am glad I did _not_,' replied Adeline: 'but how can you persist in talking to me of any other person's anxiety, when I am tortured with yours? Your conversation of to-night has made me even more miserable than I was before. By what strange fatality do you blame yourself for the conduct worthy of admiration?--for giving to the world, as soon as produced, opinions which were calculated to enlighten it?' 'But,' replied Glenmurray, 'as those opinions militated against the experience and custom of ages, ought I not to have paused before I published, and kept them back till they had received the sanction of my maturer judgment?' 'And does your maturer judgment condemn them?' 'Four years cannot have added much to the maturity of my judgment,' replied Glenmurray: 'but I will own that some of my opinions are changed; and that, though I believe those which are unchanged are right in theory, I think, as the mass of society could never _at once_ adopt them, they had better remain unacted upon, than that a few lonely individuals should expose themselves to certain distress, by making them the rules of their conduct. You, for instance, you, my Adeline, what misery--!' Here his voice again faltered, and emotion impeded his utterance. 'Live--do but live,' exclaimed Adeline passionately, 'and I can know of misery but the name.'