"Such a state of mind is foreign to your nature. You have prudence and forecast. You used to make plans for the future, and study the final results of every thing you did. There is something upon your mind. It is not imprisonment only that has caused that compression of your lips, and marked those lines on your face. You have met with some deep disaster, some overwhelming disappointment. Nothing else could have wrought such a convulsion in you." Morton was taken by surprise; and, as he struggled to frame an answer, his features betrayed an emotion which he could not hide. Fanny Euston hastened to relieve his embarrassment, and assuage, as far as she could, the tumult she had called up. "With whatever fate you may have had to battle, your wounds are in the front,--all honorable scars. Your desperation is past;--it was only for the hour;--and for the other extreme, it is not in you to suffer that." "What other extreme?" "Idle dreaming;--melancholy;--weak pining at disappointment." "No, thank God, it is not in me to lie and whine like a sick child." "You are the firmer for what you have passed. Manhood, the proudest of all possession to a man, is strengthened and deepened in you." "What do you call this manhood, which you seem to hold in such high account?" "That unflinching quality which, strong in generous thought and high purpose, bears onward towards its goal, knowing no fear but the fear of God; wise, prudent, calm, yet daring and hoping all things; not dismayed by reverses, nor elated by success; never bending nor receding; wearying out ill fortune by undespairing constancy; unconquered by pain or sorrow, or deferred hope; fiery in attack, steadfast in resistance, unshaken in the front of death; and when courage is vain, and hope seems folly, when crushing calamity presses it to the earth, and the exhausted body will no longer obey the still undaunted mind, then putting forth its hardest, saddest heroism, the unlaurelled heroism of endurance, patiently biding its time." "And how if its time never come?" "Then dying at its post, like the Roman sentinel at Pompeii." Her words struck a chord in Morton's nature, and roused his early enthusiasm, dormant for years. "Fanny," he said, "I thank you. You give me back my youth. An hour ago, the world was as dull to me as a November day; but you have brought June back again. You would make a coward valiant, and breathe life into a dead man."