"You must have suffered beyond all power of words to speak it. The world to you was fresh and full of interest. You were ambitious; full of ardor and energy; loving hardship for its own sake, and obstacles for the sake of conquering them. You were formed for action. It was your element--your breath; and without it you did not care to live. You were high in confidence, and believed that whatever you had once resolved on must, sooner or later, come to pass." "Why are you saying this?" demanded Morton, in great surprise. "Out of this life you were suddenly snatched and buried in a dungeon; shut off from all intercourse with men; your energies stifled; your restless mind left to prey upon itself, or sustain a weary siege against despair. Pain or danger you could have faced like a man; but this passive misery must to you have been a daily death." "Who," interrupted Morton, "taught you, a woman, to penetrate the nature of a man, and describe sufferings that you never felt?" "Your mind was like a spring of steel, springing up the more strongly the harder it was pressed down. The suffering must have been deep indeed from which you could not rebound. To have escaped, to have reached home, and to have found any thing but relief and delight----" "Home!" ejaculated Morton, bitterly, as a sharp memory of the anguish which had met him on the threshold came over him. "A prison may be borne with patience. Those are fortunate who have felt no keener stabs." The words, equivocal as they were, were scarcely spoken, when he had repented them. Fanny Euston was silent for a moment. "Can it be possible," she thought, "that the stories whispered about, that before he went away he was engaged to Edith Leslie, are something more than an idle rumor?" "Why do you look at me so searchingly?" thought Morton, on his part, as, raising his eyes, he saw those of his friend fixed on him in a gaze in which a woman's curiosity was mingled with a fully equal share of a woman's kindliness and sympathy. He hastened to escape from the critical ground which he had approached. "I can retort upon you," he said. "You have had your ordeal, too." "What, do you see its traces? Do you find me scorched and withered?" "I see," said Morton, "such traces as on gold that has passed through the furnace." "Truly, I have cause to rejoice, then; for I remember that, among other compliments, you once intimated your opinion that I was possessed with a devil." "I am afraid that I pushed to its farthest limit my privilege of cousinship." "And yet, when I look back to that time, I cannot help thinking that you had some reason for believing that an influence from the nether world had some share in me." "Now pardon me, if I am rude again. Looking at you, I can see the same devil still." "Indeed, and you will console me now, as you did then, by telling me that a dash of viciousness is necessary to make a character interesting."