"Enough; good-night. We are now one, Gerard; united by our love and honour for your wronged mother's memory, and by our revenge; dissimilar only in this, that my desire to repair her injuries is more vehement even than yours." Sir Boyvill pressed his son's hand, and left him. A few minutes afterward, it would seem, he quitted the house. "Now to my task," thought Neville; "and O, thou God, who watchest over the innocent, and yet gavest the innocent into the hands of the destroyer, rule thou the throbbings of my heart; that neither mad hate nor hunger for revenge take away my human nature, and turn me into a fiend!" He took up the manuscript; at first the words seemed written in fire, but he grew calmer as he found how far back the narration went; and curiosity succeeding to devouring impatience, he became attentive. He read and pitied. All that awoke Sir Boyvill's ire; Falkner's presumption in daring to love, and his long-cherished constancy, excited his compassion. When he came to the account of the meeting of the forsaken lover and happy husband, he found, in the epithets so liberally bestowed in the contemptuous description of his father, a cause for his augmented desire for vengeance. When he read that his mother herself repined, herself spoke disparagingly of her husband, he wondered at the mildness of Sir Boyvill's expressions with regard to her, and began to suspect that some strange and appalling design must be working in his head to produce this unnatural composure. The rest was madness, madness and misery, thus to take a wife and mother from her home, to gratify the insane desire to exert for one half hour a power he had lost for ever; the vain hope of turning her from her duties, which at least, as far as her children were concerned, were the dearest part of herself; her terror, her incapacity of mastering her alarm, the night of insensibility which she passed in the hut--with a start, Gerard felt sure that he had seen and marked that very spot; all wrought him up to the height of breathless interest; till, when he read the sad end of all, cold dew gathered on his brow, the tears that filled his eyes changed to convulsive sobbings, and, despite his manhood, he wept with the agony of a child. He ended the tale, and he thought--"Yes, there is but one termination to this tragedy; I must avenge my sweet mother, and, by the death of Falkner, proclaim her innocence." But wherefore, it came across his mind, had his father called him murderer? in intention and very deed he was none; why term the narrative a lie? He followed it word by word, and felt that truth was stamped in every line.