"Cease, child!—prate no more of what you feel for Christopher Neville! You say you love too much to doubt him. What is your love to mine? I know him guilty, and yet, God help me, I love him still!"
CHAPTER XII
HOW LOVERS ARE CONVINCED
Nothing is more impossible than to predict what one's emotions will be in any given crisis. If any one had told Christopher Neville that lying in a shed under accusation of murder, believed guilty by his lady love, cast off by his friend, his most acute sensation would be envy of the tobacco which the sentry was smoking outside the door, he would have laughed the prophet to scorn; yet so it was.
The nervous strain, added to the cold of the tobacco-house, was more than he could bear, and beyond any spiritual help he craved physical stimulant, something to make "a man of him" again, to give him back that courage and coolness which had never yet deserted him, but which he felt now slipping away fast.
At length he felt shame at such loss of manhood, and began to take himself to task.
"Come, now, Christopher Neville, thou sourfaced son of ill fortune!" he said aloud, as if talking to another person, "state thy woes, one by one, and I will combat them with what heart I may. Begin then!—What first?"
"I am in prison."
"Where many a better man has been before thee. In a palace thou mightst be in worse company."