"Where is your faith, while you feel so?" asked Edward, smiling. "Do you really think that confidence proceeds only while people believe each other perfect,--while they have not anxieties, and disappointments, and remorse? Do you not feel that our faults, or rather our failures, bind us together?" "Our faults bind us together!" exclaimed Hester. "Oh how happy I should be, if I could think that!" "We cannot but think it. We shall find it so, love, every day. When our faith fails, when we are discouraged, instead of fighting the battle with our faithlessness alone, we shall come to one another for courage, for stimulus, for help to see the bright, the true side of everything." "That supposes that we can do so," said Hester, sadly. "But I cannot. I have all my life intended to repose entire confidence, and I have never done it yet." "Yes: you have in me. You cannot help it. You think that you cannot, only because you mean more by reposing confidence than others do. Your spirit is too noble, too ingenuous, too humble for concealment. You cannot help yourself, Hester: you have fully confided in me, and you will go on to do so." Hester shook her head mournfully. "I have done it hitherto with you, and with you only," said she: "and the mason has been--you know the reason--the same which made me own all to you, that first evening in the shrubbery. Ah! I see you think that this is a lasting security; that, as you will never change, I never shall: but you do not understand me wholly yet. There is something that you do not know,--that I cannot make you believe: but you will find it true, when it is too late. No good influence is permanent with me; many, all have been tried; and the evil that is in me gets the better of them all at last." She snatched her hand from her lover's, and covered her face to hide her tears. "I shall not contradict you, Hester," said he, tenderly, "because you will only abase yourself the more in your own eyes. But tell me again-- where is your faith, while you let spectres from the past glide over into the future, to terrify you? I say `you' and not `us,' because I am not terrified. I fear nothing. I trust you, and I trust Him who brought us together, and moved you to lay open your honest heart to me." "My sick heart, Edward. It is sick with fear. I thought I had got over it. I thought you had cured it; and that now, on this day, of all days, I should have been full of your spirit--of the spirit which made me so happy a few weeks ago, that I was sure I should never fall back again. But I am disappointed in myself, Edward--wholly disappointed in myself. I have often been so before, but this time it is fatal. I shall never make you happy, Edward." "Neither God nor man requires it of you, Hester. Dismiss it--."