Produced by Al Haines. [Illustration: Cover] CLARA VAUGHAN _A NOVEL_ IN THREE VOLUMES VOL III. R. D. Blackmore London and Cambridge: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1864. _The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved._ LONDON: R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL. CLARA VAUGHAN BOOK IV. (_continued_). CHAPTER X. STORY OF EDGAR VAUGHAN. Child Clara, for your own dear sake, as well as mine and my sweet love’s, I will not dwell on that tempestuous time. If you cannot comprehend it without words, no words will enable you. If you can, and I fear you do, no more words are wanted; and, as an old man weary of the world, I know not whether to envy or to pity you. Hither and thither I was flung, to the zenith star of ecstasy or the nadir gulf of agony, according as my idol pet chose to smile or frown. Though she was no silly child, but a girl of mind and feeling, she had a store, I must confess, of clouds as well as dazzling sunlight in the empyrean of her eyes. Her nature, like my love, was full of Southern passion. It is like the air they breathe, the beauty they behold. One minute of such love compresses in a thunder flood all the slow emotions stealing through the drought-scrimped channel, where we dredge for gold deposits, through ten years of Saxon courtship. Instead of Lily-bloom, she should have been called the Passion-flower. My life, my soul--how weak our English words are--she loved me from the first, I can take my oath she did, although her glory was too great for her to own it yet, though now and then her marvellous eyes proved traitors. Sometimes when she was racking me most, feigning even, with those eyes cast down, her pellucid fingers point to point, and her little foot tapping the orchid bloom, feigning, I say, in cold blood, to reckon her noble lovers--long names all and horribly hateful to me--suddenly, while I trembled, and scowled like a true-born Briton, suddenly up would leap the silky drooping lashes, and a spring of soft electric light would flutter through them to the very core of my heart. As for me, I abandoned myself. I made no pretence of waiting a moment. I flung my heart wide open to her, and if she would not come in, desert it should be for ever. She did come. That life-blood of my soul came in, and would and could live nowhere else for ever.