"Yes, let me go my way. I had not meant you to know it; but once--yes, I will confess it to you--I scorned you to her. God knows how I have repented; for I was beside myself then, blinded with my own folly and arrogance. And now you have won the woman I love, whom I shall always love, and it will be at once my bliss and my punishment. Take your triumph--tell her that her erring knight came back, and paid her the highest homage of his soul." Then, in a sudden, changed tone, freighted with a pain that pierced the other's heart, he cried, "Jack Darcy, I have made amends for that selfish blunder of my young manhood. For weeks I have endured such pangs, that Heaven grant you may never know! I have walked by her side with polar wastes between us; I have touched her hand with fingers that have had no more passion in them than the dead; I have watched her dewy lips ripe with kisses, and remembered they were for you; I have been true, _true_ in word and deed and desire, but in thought I must love her to her life's end. I will go quite away"-- Up to this point his words had come with the heat and flow of a lava-torrent. Now his impassioned voice faltered, trembled, and seemed to lose itself. Jack Darcy stood transfixed. Was it a dream? Had Fred been so blind all this while? He essayed speech; but the lines about his mouth were constricted, and his breath came in quivering gasps, as the vision of torture, suffered for honor's sake, rose up before him. Ah! if ever he _had_ sinned,--and the temporary forgetfulness appeared such a little thing to Jack's generous soul,--he had redeemed himself nobly. "Oh! you thought--she doesn't love me, Fred,--not in that way," and his voice had the full, throbbing inflection of a great joy. "We are friends, such as a man and a woman can truly be. Do you not understand that some people are so alike they run in parallels? there are no angles to create the intense friction of love, they are so evenly balanced that there is no desire for possessorship, they have just as wholesome an influence over each other remaining apart. There is hardly Sylvie's equal in the world. Half that I am, I owe her." Had the night changed? Was the world flooded with a serene and tender light? Was the moaning ocean filled with the wondrous music of immortal love and longing, reaching out to glad fruition? Was that sudden rare peace, creating a reverential atmosphere about him, an earnest of days to come? He experienced a vivid lightness as if he were being borne on clouds, while fragments of delicious remembrances floated through his brain. The very refinement of his nature seemed to exalt him to that high heaven of love, whose solemn mysteries it is not lawful to utter.