He held up his hands with a wild deprecating gesture. "Am I not sufficiently punished?" he said. "If I was wrong--criminal--think of what the circumstances were, Hester. Can your heart find no excuse for me? and see what my punishment is already. Instead of the natural joy which a man looks for, when he carries his bride home, I have anticipated this day with terror--and my fears are more than realized. Have I become a different person from him to whom you said this very night, 'I am your wife?' Am not I the same man you promised your heart and love to? the same with whom you left your father's house? Hester! I have deceived you--I do not try to make my fault less. Say it was a deliberate, premeditated fault--I do not deny it, but I am not changed. Condemn it, but be merciful to me." "No, you are not the same man," I answered, "you are not Harry, you are Edgar Southcote. I never gave either hand or heart to you, I gave them to one who was not capable of fraud--who knew nothing of a lie--he is gone and dead, and I will never find him more either in heaven or earth. You have killed my Harry--you have killed my heart within me. I never molested you. I never appealed to you for pity. I had forgotten Cottiswoode; it was nothing to me. Why did you come with your false compassion to steal away my hopes, and my heart, and my youth?" "Compassion, Hester? where is there any compassion in the matter?" he exclaimed; "you show none to me." "No--I only want justice," said I; "oh! I know you have been generous--I know it was a kind meaning, a charitable impulse, to restore to me my father's land. Do not let us speak of it, if I am to keep my reason now--I fancied such a thing could never happen to me. I did not think I could have been so humiliated. I trusted you--I trusted you with all my heart--will you let me stay here, and leave me to myself? I want to collect myself--to think of what is all over and past, and of what remains." "What remains? what will you do, Hester?" he cried, growing very pale. But I could not tell--I looked round me with a dreary desolate search for something to support me. I had no one to flee to--not one in all the world. What a change since yesterday--since this morning, when I had everything in having him. I remember that he came to me and kissed my hand--that he bent over it, and entreated me to forgive him; that I turned away and would not look at him, nor listen, with a hard and breathless obduracy, and that then he said, "Good-night--good-night!" and slowly went away.