"And yet, you were both gay and joyous yesterday, Edith; and all last week, since I have been at the castle, I have heard no sounds so gay or so pleasant to my ear as your merry ballads. And you are no more a serf this morn than you were yestrene, and the good God alone knows what any of us all may be on the morrow, Edith. Something, I know, must have happened, girl, to make you wear a face so altered on this beautiful summer day, and carry so sad a heart, when all the world is so happy." "All the world, lady!" replied Edith; "all the world happy! Alas! not one tenth of it, unless you mean the beasts and the birds, which, knowing nothing, are blithe in their happy innocence. Of the human world around us, lady, one half knows not, and more by far than one half cares not, how miserable or how hopeless are their fellows--nor, if all knew and cared for all, could they either comprehend or console, much less relieve, the miserable." "But if I be one of those, Edith, who know not, I am at least not one of those who care not. Therefore, I come back to the place whence I started. Something has happened, which makes you dwell so much more dolefully to-day, upon that which weighed not on you, yestrene, heavier than a feather." "Something _has_ happened, lady. But it is all one; for it resolves itself in all but into this; I am a slave--a slave, until life is over." "This is strange," said Guendolen, thoughtfully. "I do not understand--_may_ not understand this. It does not seem to me that your duties are so very hard, your life so very painful, or your rule so very strict, that you should suddenly thus give way to utter gloom and despondency, for no cause but what you have known for years, and found endurable until this moment." "But henceforth unendurable. Oh! talk not, lady, talk not. You may console the dying, for to him there is a hope, a present hope of a quick-coming future. But comfort not the slave; for to him the bitterest and most cruel past is happier than the hopeless present, if only for that it is past; and the present, hopeless as it is, is yet less desperate than the future; for to the slave, in the future, every thing except happiness is possible. I may seem to speak enigmas to you, lady, and I am sure that you do not understand me--how should you? None but a slave can know or imagine what it is to be a slave; none can conceive what a slave feels, thinks, suffers. And yet a slave is a man, after all; and a lord is no more than a man, while living--and yet, what a gulf between them!" "And you will not tell me, Edith," persisted the Lady Guendolen, "you will not tell me what it is that has happened to you of late, which makes you grieve so despondently, thus on a sudden, over your late-endured condition? Then you must let me divine it. You have learned your own heart of late. You have discovered that you love, Edith."