"This idea cannot astonish you, my love; you have seen too much of the secret of my heart; you have witnessed my fits of distress and anguish, and are not now told, for the first time, that grief and remorse weigh intolerably on me. I can endure the infliction no longer. May God forgive me in another world--the light of this I will see no more!" Falkner saw the sort of astonished distress her countenance depicted; and, angry with himself for being its cause, was going on in a voice changed to one less expressive of misery, but Elizabeth, seized with dismay--the unbidden tears pouring from her eyes--her young--her child's heart bursting with a new sense of horror--cast herself at his feet, and, embracing his knees as he sat, exclaimed, "My dear, dear father!--my more than father, and only friend--you break my heart by speaking thus. If you are miserable, the more need that your child--the creature you preserved, and taught to love you--should be at your side to comfort--I had almost said to help you. You must not cast me off! Were you happy, you might desert me; but if you are miserable, I cannot leave you--you must not ask me--it kills me to think of it!" The youthful, who have no experience of the changes of life, regard the present with far more awe and terror than those who have seen one turn in the hourglass suffice to change, and change again, the colour of their lives. To be divided from Falkner was to have the pillars of the earth shaken under her--and she clung to him, and looked up imploringly in his face, as if the next word he spoke were to decide all; he kissed her, and, seating her on his knee, said, "Let us talk of this more calmly, dearest--I was wrong to agitate you--or to mix the miserable thoughts forced on me by my wretchedness, with the prudent consideration of your future destiny. I feel it to be unjust to keep you from your relations. They are rich. We are ignorant of what changes and losses may have taken place among them, to soften their hearts--which, after all, were never shut against you. You may have become of importance in their eyes. Raby is a proud name, and we must not heedlessly forego the advantages that may belong to your right to it."