"Oh! What brought it on?"
"The news," Hubert answered reluctantly, "of Westwood's reprieve."
Miss Lepel smiled again.
"Was he so very angry?" she said. "Ah, he would do anything in his power to bring his brother's murderer to justice—I have heard him say so a hundred times! You ought to be very grateful to me, Hubert, for remembering that you are my brother."
"I wish to Heaven I were not!" cried the young man.
"For some things I wish you were not too," said Florence slowly. She sat up, clasped her white hands round her knees, and looked at him reflectively. "If you had not been my brother, I suppose you would not have interfered," she went on. "You would have left me to pursue my wicked devices, and simply turned your back on me and Sydney Vane. I agree with you. I wish to Heaven—if you like that form of expression—that you were not my brother, Hubert Lepel! You have made the misery of my life."
"And you the disgrace of mine!" he said bitterly.
"Then we are quits," she answered, in the listless, passionless voice that she seemed especially to affect. "We need not reproach each other; we have each had something to bear at one another's hands."
"Florence," said Hubert—and his voice trembled a little as he spoke—"what are you going to do? It is, as you say, useless for us to reproach each other for the past; but for the future let me at least be certain that my sacrifice will avail to keep you in a right path, that you will not again—not again——"
"This is very edifying," said Florence quietly, as the young man broke off short in his speech, and turned away with a despairing stamp of the foot—his sister's face would have discomfited a man of far greater moral courage than poor Hubert Lepel—"it is something new for me to be lectured by my younger brother, whose course has surely not been quite irreproachable, I should imagine! Come, Hubert—do not be so absurd! You have acted according to your lights, as the old women say, and I according to mine. There is nothing more for us to talk about. Let us quit the subject; the past is dead."