"Ask your own heart: hasn't it anger, hatred, and despair in it? Did I not hear you call aloud for vengeance?" "And what good can come of it?" continued she, seeing he made no reply; "like you, I've had all that in my heart, until curses loud and bitter have followed one after another, heaped on those who injured me, and yet I'm as far off from happiness as ever. I began to seek it when I was a young woman, and look! my hair is grey, and yet I have not found it; while the fierce anger, the strong will to return evil for evil, have faded from my spirit like the slow whitening of these grey hairs. There's only despair now, and hatred for those, for _her_ who did me wrong." "Do we all hate as mercilessly as this? I feel that a look, a word of love would turn my heart from bitterness." "Then the injury has not been deep. I've lived here a lonely woman twenty years, and a look, a word, will sometimes call the fierce blood to my heart. When the injury is eternal and irremediable then the hate must be lasting too." "The injured heart may forgive," said Vavasour. "It may forgive. But forget its hate! its wrongs! its despair! Never, never," said she, fiercely. "It may be so," said Robert, half aloud. "May be so? It is so. Hate is a deadly enemy; don't let it creep into your heart; tear it out! cast it from you! for once you have it, it is yours for ever; even death cannot part it from you." "I doubt that. We know that even a dying sinner's heart may repent and be softened; the thought that he is perishing from the earth nursing a deadly sin at his heart would do much; he would never dare die so." "Prayers, the pleadings of an agonised, breaking heart may be vain--in vain--was vain, young man, for I tried it," replied Goody Grey, her voice suddenly changing from fierceness to mournful sadness. "Surely there could not be a heart so hard, if you pleaded rightly." "Don't tell me that!" she exclaimed, raising her voice, "don't tell me there was anything I might have done. Did I not kneel and pray? Did I not take back my curses and give blessings? Did I not plead my broken heart and withered youth? But death came, even as I knelt; the hate was too strong, and the words I panted to hear were unspoken. What have you to say to that?" "Hope," replied Robert; "what you have done at a death bed, I have done during life, and been refused; death has come since, and I am seemingly as far off as ever; and yet I hope on." "Hope on, hope ever," said she, sadly, "yes, that's all that's left me now, but it doesn't satisfy the cravings of my heart; never will!" "Have you no relations? You must live but a lonely life here," said Robert. "That is the only living thing that loves me," she replied, pointing to the parrot, sitting pluming his feathers. "He's been with me in joy and sorrow. Don't touch him; he is savage with strangers." "Not with me," said Robert, smoothing his feathers gently.