"Spare me, Mittie," exclaimed the humbled and convicted Clinton. "Trample not on a fallen wretch, who has nothing to say in his defence. But one thing I will say, I have not intended to deceive you. I did love you, and felt at the time all that I professed. Had you loved me less, I had been more constant. But why, let me ask, have you sought me here, to upbraid me for my inconstancy? What good can it do to you or to me? You call me a wretch: and I acknowledge myself to be one, a vile, ungrateful wretch. Call me a thief, if you will, if the word does not blister your tongue to utter it. I confess it all. Now leave me to my fate." "Confess one thing more," said Mittie, "speak to me as if it were your dying hour--for you will soon be dead to me, and tell me, if it is for the love of Helen you abandon mine?" Clinton hesitated, a red color flushed his pallid cheek. He could not at that moment, in the presence of such deep and true passion, utter a falsehood; and degraded as he was, he could not bear to inflict the pain an avowal of the truth might cause. "Speak," she urged, "and speak truly. It is all the atonement I ask." "My love can only reflect disgrace on its object. Rejoice that it rests on her, rather than yourself. But she has avenged your wrongs. She rejected me before my hand was polluted with this last foul crime. She upbraided me for my perfidy to you, and fled from my sight with horror. Had she loved me, I might have been saved--but I am lost now." Mittie stood immovable as a statue. Her eyes were fixed upon the floor, her brow contracted and her lips firmly closed. She appeared to be going through a petrifying process, so marble was her complexion, so rigid her features, so unchanging her attitude. "'Twas but a moment o'er her soul Winters of memory seemed to roll," congealing her as they rolled. As Clinton looked upon her and contrasted that pale and altered form, with the resplendent figure that he had beheld like an embodied rainbow on the sun-gilded arch, his conscience stung him with a scorpion sting. He had said to himself, while parlying with the tempter about the gold, that he had never _stolen_. He now felt convicted of a far worse robbery, of a more inexpiable crime--for which God, if not man, would judge him--the theft of a young and trusting heart, of its peace, its confidence and hope, leaving behind a cold and dreary void. He could not bear the sight of that desolate figure, so lately quickened with glowing passions.