"How are you now?" inquired he.
"Much the same; I feel very weak, and have at times a most painful sensation of being suffocated. Why was I not permitted to quit this world during my late attack?"
"Sarah," replied Thomas Seyton, after a momentary silence, "you are hovering between life and death,—any violent emotion might destroy you or recall your feeble powers and restore you to health."
"There can be no further trial for me, brother!"
"You know not that—"
"I could now even hear that Rodolph were dead without a shock. The pale spectre of my murdered child—murdered through my instrumentality, is ever before me. It creates not mere emotion, but a bitter and ceaseless remorse. Oh, brother, I have known the feelings of a mother only since I have become childless."
"I own I liked better to find in you that cold, calculating ambition, that made you regard your daughter but as a means of realising the dream of your whole existence."
"That ambition fell to the ground, crushed for ever beneath the overwhelming force of the prince's reproaches. And the picture drawn by him of the horrors to which my child had been exposed awakened in my breast all a mother's tenderness."
"And how," said Seyton, hesitatingly and laying deep emphasis on each word he uttered, "if by a miracle, a chance, an almost impossibility, your daughter were still living, tell me how you would support such a discovery."
"I should expire of shame and despair!"