"Your presence here, sir, is an insult," she says to Desmond, meaning to be stern; but her grief has washed away the incivility of her little speech and has left it only vaguely reproachful. Desmond lowers his head before her gaze, and refrains from answer or explanation. A great sorrow for the defencelessness of _their_ sorrow has arisen in his breast for these old aunts, and killed all meaner thoughts. I think he would have felt a degree of relief if they had both fallen upon him, and said hard things to him, and so revenged themselves in part. Monica is sobbing bitterly. Not able to endure her grief, Desmond, going even to the feet of Miss Priscilla, tries to raise her from the ground. But she clings even more closely to Miss Priscilla, and so mutely refuses to go to him. A pang, a sudden thought, shoots through him, and renders him desperate. Will they be bad to his poor little girl when he is gone? will they scold her? "Oh, madam," he says to Miss Priscilla, with a break in his voice, "_try_ to forgive her; be gentle with her. It was all my fault,--mine entirely. I loved her, and when she refused to hear me plead my cause, and shrunk from me because of that unhappy division that separates my family from yours, and because of her reverence for your wishes, I still urged her, and induced her to meet me secretly." "You did an evil deed, sir," says Miss Priscilla. "I acknowledge it. I am altogether to blame," says Desmond, hastily. "She has had nothing to do with it. Do not, I beseech you, say anything to her when I am gone that may augment her self-reproach." He looks with appealing eyes at Miss Blake, his hand on Monica's shoulder, who has her face hidden in a fold of her aunt's gown. "Sir," says Miss Priscilla, drawing herself up, with a touch of old-world grandeur in her manner, but a sad tremulousness in her tone, "my niece has been with us now for some time, and we have dared to hope she has been treated in accordance with the great love we feel for her." "The _great_ love," echoes Miss Penelope, gently. Though deeply distressed, both old ladies are conscious of a subdued admiration for the young man, because of the tenderness of his fears for his beloved. "But if," says Miss Priscilla, with a mournful glance at the pretty bowed head--"if _she_ thinks we have failed in our love towards her, as indeed it seems it may be, by your finding it necessary to ask us to treat her with kindness in this trouble,--we can only say to her that we regret,--that we----" Here she breaks down, and covers her sad old face with her trembling hands. Monica springs to her feet. "Oh, auntie!" she says, a world of love and reproach and penitence in her voice. She throws her arms round her aunt's neck; and, Miss Priscilla clasping her in turn, somehow in one moment the crime is condoned, and youth and age are met in a fond embrace.