Elizabeth began to speak almost sportively, but the mention of America brought to her recollection the cause of his going and the circumstances that prevented him; and the tears gushed from her eyes as she continued, in a voice broken by emotion, "Oh, Mr. Neville, I smile while my heart is breaking--my dear, dear father! What misery is this that you have brought on him--and now, while he treated you with unreserve, have you falsely--you must know--accused him of crime, and pursued your vengeance in a vindictive and ignominious manner? It is not well done!" "I pardon your injustice," said Neville, "though it is very great. One of my reasons for coming was to explain the exact state of things, though I believed that your knowledge of me would have caused you to reject the idea of my being a party to my father's feelings of revenge." Neville then related all that had passed; the discovery of his mother's remains in the very spot Falkner had indicated, and Sir Boyvill's resolve to bring the whole train of events before the public. "Perhaps," he continued, "my father believes in the justice of his accusation--he never saw Mr. Falkner, and cannot be impressed as I am by the tokens of a noble mind, which, despite his errors, are indelibly imprinted on his brow. At all events, he is filled with a sense of his own injuries--stung by the disdain heaped on him in that narration, and angry that he had been led to wrong a wife, the memory of whose virtues and beauty now revives bitterly to reproach him. I cannot wonder at his conduct, even while I deplore it: I do deplore it on your account; for Mr. Falkner, God knows I would have visited his crime in another mode; yet all he suffers he has brought on himself--he must feel it due--and must bear it as best he may: forgive me if I seem harsh--I compassionate him through you--I cannot for his own sake." "How falsely do you reason," cried Elizabeth; "and you also are swayed and perverted by passion. He is innocent of the hideous crime laid to his charge--you know and feel that he is innocent; and were he guilty--I have heard you lament that crime is so hardly visited by the laws of society. I have heard you say, that even where guilt is joined to the hardness of habitual vice, that it ought to be treated with the indulgence of a correcting father, not by the cruel vengeance of the law. And now, when one whose very substance and flesh are corroded by remorse--one whose conscience acts as a perpetual scourge--one who has expiated his fault by many years spent in acts of benevolence and heroism; this man, because his error has injured you, you, forgetting your own philosophy, would make over to a fate which, considering who and what he is, is the most calamitous human imagination can conceive."