"H--m! a successful epitome of your creed and character! You can cast old affections and memories from you with as little emotion as a bird moults its feathers; and having got rid of one set of sensations, you can begin again, and so go on, destroying and renewing, and still thinking yourself misunderstood and injured, and taking your revenge in fresh indulgences." "I will endure no more of this," I exclaimed, seizing my hat and going toward the door; "let us part, before I forget the ties that once bound us together." "Forget them?" he echoed, and his face grew ghastly pale; but, forcibly controlling his agitation, he went on, in a low voice: "Have you not forgotten them already? Have you not shaken them off like dust from your feet? Ay, let us part; I am unfit to be your friend or companion. Leave me to mate with him you have bereaved, and whose heart is desolate like mine! There, at least, I shall find a community of feeling on one point--the blight which we both owe to you. Go! Leave me--no words--no words!" Had I spoken it would have been angrily. But although my pride was wounded, and I was bitterly mortified and disappointed at the result of a meeting, which, instead of alleviating my anxiety, had only loaded me with miseries, I felt that it would have been barbarous at that moment, had I given way to my own feelings. I stood and gazed upon him in silence while I held the half-opened door in my hand. The old feeling was all at once revived, and as he buried his head in his broad, shapeless hands, and bent over the table, the night when he related to me the singular history with which he prefaced the introduction to Gertrude, came back upon me with all its agonies and terrors as freshly as if but a few weeks, instead of long and checkered years, had elapsed in the interval. His great anguish on that occasion, and the grandeur of the sacrifice he made to what he hoped would have been the foundation of the life-long happiness of her he loved, returned with painful distinctness. He was changed in nothing since, except in the haggard expression of his face and figure. His heart--his strong, manly heart--was still the same. His affections were in the grave with Gertrude; he had traversed half the world, had been thrown into trying circumstances, and doubtless, like other men, had been exposed to many temptations, yet he had never swerved from his early attachment, and had brought back with him from his wanderings the same truthfulness and the same sorrow he had carried with him into exile. How strange it was that he, of all men, should be cast by the force of accidental occurrences into close communion with the dwarf! that the only men on earth who in the depths of their hearts could--whether justly or unjustly, mattered little--find a cause for hating and denouncing me, should be drawn together, not by any sympathy of their own, but by a common resentment against me! these two men, so utterly unlike each other in every thing