The great natural gift of Mr. Cartwright was the power of making his voice, his eye, and the flexible muscles of his handsome mouth, echo, and, as it were reverberate and reiterate every word he spoke, giving to his language a power beyond its own. What he now said was uttered rapidly, but with an apparent depth and intensity of feeling that brought tears of mingled gratitude and admiration to the eyes of Mrs. Mowbray. After a moment given to this not unpleasing emotion, she said, "It was from you, Mr. Cartwright, if I remember rightly, that I first heard the enactments of my husband's will. When I give you my word, as I now most solemnly do, that I had never during his life the slightest knowledge of what that will was to be, I think you will believe me." "Believe you!" exclaimed Mr. Cartwright. "Is there on earth a being sufficiently depraved to doubt an assertion so vouched by you?" "Oh, Mr. Cartwright! if all men had your generous, and, I will say, just confidence in me, I should not now be in the position I am! But Sir Gilbert Harrington, the person most unhappily chosen by Mr. Mowbray as joint executor with myself, is persuaded that this generous will was made in my favour solely in consequence of my artful influence over him; and so deeply does he resent this imputed crime, that instead of standing forward, as he ought to do, as the protector and agent of his friend's widow, he loads the memory of that friend with insult, and oppresses me with scorn and revilings, the more bitter because conveyed to me by my own child." Mrs. Mowbray wept.--Mr. Cartwright hid his face with his hands, and for some moments seemed fearful of betraying all he felt. At length he fixed his eyes upon her--eyes moistened by a tear, and in a low, deep voice that seemed to indicate an inward struggle, he uttered, "_Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord_!" He closed his eyes, and sat for a moment silent,--then added, "Perhaps of all the trials to which we are exposed in this world of temptation, the obeying this mandate is the most difficult! But, like all uttered by its Divine Author, it is blessed alike by its authority and its use. Without it!--my friend! without it, would not my hand be grappling the throat of your malignant enemy?--Without it, should I not even now be seeking to violate the laws of God and man, to bring the wretch who can thus stab an angel woman's breast to the dust before her? But, thanks to the faith that is in me, I _know_ that his suspicious heart and cruel soul shall meet a vengeance as much greater than any I could inflict, as the hand that wields it is more powerful than mine! I humbly thank Heaven for this, and remembering it, turn with chastened spirit from the forbidden task of punishing him, to the far more Christian one of offering aid to the gentle being he would crush.--Was it indeed from the lips of your child, my poor friend, that these base aspersions reached you?"