"Do not--do not weep so," murmured Lady Florence, frightened by his vehemence; "I am sadly changed, but the fault is mine--Ernest, it is mine; best, kindest, gentlest, how could I have been so mad! And you forgive me? I am yours again--a little while yours. Ah, do not grieve while I am so blessed!" As she spoke, her tears--tears from a source how different from that whence broke the scorching and intolerable agony of his own! fell soft upon his bended head, and the hands that still convulsively strained hers. Maltravers looked wildly up into her countenance, and shuddered as he saw her attempt to smile. He rose abruptly, threw himself into a chair, and covered his face. He was seeking by a violent effort to master himself, and it was only by the heaving of his chest, and now and then a gasp as for breath, that he betrayed the stormy struggle within. Florence gazed at him a moment in bitter, in almost selfish penitence. "And this was the man who seemed to me so callous to the softer sympathies--this was the heart I trampled upon--this the nature I distrusted!" She came near him, trembling and with feeble steps--she laid her hand upon his shoulder, and the fondness of love came over her, and she wound her arms around him. "It is our fate--it is my fate," said Maltravers at last, awaking as from a hideous dream, and in a hollow but calm voice--"we are the things of destiny, and the wheel has crushed us. It is an awful state of being this human life!--What is wisdom--virtue--faith to men--piety to Heaven--all the nurture we bestow on ourselves--all our desire to win a loftier sphere, when we are thus the tools of the merest chance--the victims of the pettiest villainy; and our very existence--our very senses almost, at the mercy of every traitor and every fool!" There was something in Ernest's voice, as well as in his reflections, which appeared so unnaturally calm and deep that it startled Florence, with a fear more acute than his previous violence had done. He rose, and muttering to himself, walked to and fro, as if insensible of her presence--in fact he was so. At length he stopped short, and fixing his eyes upon Lady Florence, said in a whispered and thrilling tone: "Now, then, the name of our undoer?" "No, Ernest, no--never, unless you promise me to forego the purpose which I read in your eyes. He has confessed--he is penitent--I have forgiven him--you will do so too!" "His name!" repeated Maltravers, and his face, before very flushed, was unnaturally pale. "Forgive him--promise me." "His name, I say,--his name?" "Is this kind?--you terrify me--you will kill me!" faltered out Florence, and she sank on the sofa exhausted: her nerves, now so weakened, were perfectly unstrung by his vehemence, and she wrung her hands and wept piteously. "You will not tell me his name?" said Maltravers, softly. "Be it so. I will ask no more. I can discover it myself. Fate the Avenger will reveal it."