For as there he sat, even as he had done when suddenly confronted that night with his offended, injured brother, in the room of the London hotel, with bent brow and lowering eye, half defiance and half fear; so now still more he seemed to shrink into abject nothingness before him, abashed and confounded by the majestic power of goodness--the awful loveliness of a virtuous and noble revenge. For a few grave, calm, but gentle words from Eustace Trevor's lips had already set his anxious fears at rest--had assured him that the well-merited ruin with which the overthrow, so sudden and unlooked-for, of his unrighteous hopes and machinations had threatened to overwhelm him, would be averted. And there stood Mary, pale and motionless. Whilst from one to another wandered her distressed and startled glance, she yet saw and marked the contrast; saw--and mourned in spirit that thus too late her eyes were opened; that thus, for the first time, had been presented, side by side to her enlightened perception, the brother whom in her deceived imagination she had so blindly chosen--the one she had so ignorantly refused. Yes, too late--for could she dare now to lift her eyes to own the full, but tardy abnegation of every thought and feeling of her heart, as well as understanding, to the noble being it had lost? Oh, no! for those two last days that they had passed under the same roof together--in the same manner, as she had seemed to shrink, with timid, lowly, self-abasement from the brother of her discarded lover, had Eustace Trevor appeared almost equally to avoid any close communion with that brother's alienated love. It was, therefore, influenced by these considerations, that after her first astounded pause, feeling that it was now impossible to retreat, and scarcely knowing what she did, Mary approached the table over which Eugene Trevor had been leaning on her entrance, but now had risen--holding out her hand, as her kindly heart perhaps, under any circumstances, would have instinctively dictated towards any being suffering under like vicissitude; but something in the grasp which closed over it--a detaining grasp, such as that with which the miser may be supposed to clasp some treasure on the point of making itself wings to fly away, seemed to distress and perplex her.