“Lo! by chance I learned that she had been wooed and won by a youth of fairer proportions than myself, that tender words of affection had been poured into a not unwilling ear, and that she had promised to give her hand, with her heart in it, to him whose form and features had pleased her eye, and whose honied language had beguiled her of her love. “I know not how to describe the overwhelming agony of my heart at the discovery. I brooded over it, nursed the most terrible schemes of vengeance on him who was thus about to rob me of the only being who had sympathised with me, had reasoned with me, and had brought me back from almost brute barbarism into the realms of a common humanity; who had extirpated many of my worst failings, and replaced them by implanting virtues resembling her own. I took the first opportunity of challenging her with the tale I had heard, and she at once, with blushing face, acknowledged its truth. Then, then, in frantic terms, I confessed the idolatry with which I worshipped her; then, by an involuntary exclamation, she revealed to me that she had done all for me in commiserating pity and nought in love. Oh! the intense torture of that admission! “Our interview was long and agonising to me, and scarcely less painful to her--let me not further recur to it even at this moment, I----” Nathan Gomer abruptly rose and paced the room, hiding his averted face in his handkerchief. Recovering himself by a strong effort he returned to his seat, and continued-- “I abruptly fled home and the neighbourhood; I never returned thither; I came to London, where I changed my name. A large legacy greeted my arrival. I hastened to secure it, and to commence to increase it by every art the usurer can employ. I hated my race; I knew no more certain way of feeding, ghoul-like, on their heart’s blood, than by lending money at usurious interest. Oh! but I have, like a miserable wretch that I was, gloated over the fearful agonies of a breaking heart, and in my dreary, solitary chamber I have yelled with triumphant delight over the mad despair of those I have helped to destruction. “And so years went on. Gold showered on me from all sides. My aunt left her sole wealth to me; I converted her lands into coin, and lent it out. The proud bent like fawning spaniels at my feet--the humble knelt to me. The rich smiled and bowed to me. The high and the well-born sought--ugh! I might have surfeited myself with the ‘best society,’ yellow, ungainly dwarf though I happened to be.