"I congratulate you on your position, Miss Brandon; it is quite unassailable. You are in the right now, as you always have been. You were right, of course, in always doling out the tokens of your love in such scanty measure as your pride and your priests would allow. They ought to canonize you--those holy men! I doubt if they have another disciple so superior to all human weaknesses. It must be very gratifying to so eminent a Christian to be able to forgive plenarily, without danger of the favor being returned. I have nothing to urge against your decision--that we part forever. You will have no difficulty in forgetting me, whom you ought never to have stooped to. Yet I will give you one caution. I am not romantic, as you know, and I generally mean what I say. If you should think hereafter of bestowing yourself on some worthier object, hesitate a little for _his_ sake, or wait till I am dead; otherwise, the day that makes his happiness certain may bring him very near his grave." His voice had changed during the last words into a growl of savage menace, and his forehead was black and furrowed with passion. It might have been his own excited fancy, or the passing just then of a light cloud over the moon; but, for an instant, he thought he saw her steady lip quiver and tremble. If so, be very sure it was not fear which caused the emotion, though even that the circumstances might have excused; rather, I think, it was a pang of self-reproach--a consciousness of having acted unwisely, though for the best; perhaps, too, the stubbornness of the heart she had ruled once--so strong and proud even in its abasement--was congenial to her own besetting sin: she liked the fierce threat better than the cool sarcasm. At any rate, she answered more gently than she had yet spoken. "I believe you. But you know me better than to think a threat would influence me. Yet you need not fear my ever again trusting this world with my happiness. You will be very sorry hereafter for some things you have said to-night. Ask yourself--if I had loved you, as you seem to have expected, better than my own soul, would the result have been different? It is too late now to say any thing but--farewell. Will you not say it, as I do, kindly, or at least not in anger--Guy?" She paused between the two last words, and their imploring accent was almost piteous. There must have been a strange fascination about Livingstone, for, saint as she was, no other living creature would have won such a concession from the Christian charity of Constance Brandon.