The old creature forgot even the pangs of hunger, in the sudden relief produced by the words of her enemy. She grasped out handsful of the gold, and hugging it between her thin palms, kissed it eagerly before she would thrust it back to the box again. A moment before she had thought it all lost, now she was laughing hysterically, and shedding feeble tears over what had been saved. “Here is your supper!” said Jane, drawing the broken chair forward, and holding up the plate of food; “here is your supper!” The gold dropped from her shrivelled hands. For one moment hunger grew strong over avarice; she seized the offered food with one hand, and directly began groping after the gold with the other. While she was thus employed, Jane Kelly left the room. CHAPTER LXIV. THE BROTHERS CONSULT AGAIN. The two brothers sat together in Louis De Marke’s room. Both seemed anxious and thoughtful. George had a look of habitual sadness upon his face; but Louis was like one who struggles against fate without the resolution to brave it. “Go to her, George, go, I entreat you,” said the latter, “for I dare not, I cannot. Tell her the simple truth, say that in doubt of my position, sometimes almost forgetting it in the magnitude of my great love for her, I looked and acted as no honorable man should have done, bound as I was. True, I never spoke of love, and in this sometimes strove to satisfy my conscience; but words are the weakest confessions that a man can make; and nothing but a coward shelters his honor under the miserable pretence, that a passion uttered in every action and look is unspoken, if not syllabled in so many words. “I loved this woman in her girlhood—hopelessly, for she married another. But even in look, or gesture, it was unexpressed. Then my poor Louisa came as a more solemn barrier against this passion, came and vanished like a troubled shadow, leaving me desolate and a wanderer on the face of the earth. I came home; I found Townsend Oakley dead, and the woman I had so worshipped a widow, free as air, more beautiful than ever, and ready to renew her acquaintance with me as the dearest of her early friends. “It was wrong, I know it, George, but how could I resist the happiness of seeing her? How force myself to repel the dawning favor that I found in her eyes? I did not speak—thus appeasing conscience with mental craft. But she must have known how madly I loved her, and, conceal it as I may, it was the very delirium of joy that I felt whenever an unconscious proof escaped her, that her own warm heart answered back the passion burning so fatally in mine. “During the winter, this intimacy continued. In the spring the young widow, in pursuance of a plan laid out by her husband before his death, completed a pretty cottage on Staten Island, near the sea-shore, and retired there with her little boy.” “She had a child then?” interrupted George, with interest.