“I am not well able to rise, dear Charles,” she said, breaking the short silence which had occurred, and extending her hand; “and I suppose you have come to reproach me. As for me, I have nothing to ask you for now—nothing to hope for but pardon, and that you will forget me henceforth. Will you be noble enough to forgive her who was once your Lucy, but who can never be so more?”
The dreadful solemnity, together with the pathetic spirit of tenderness and despair that breathed in these words, caused a pulsation in his heart and a sense of suffocation about his throat that for the moment prevented him from speaking. He seized her hand, which was placed passively in his, and as he put it to his lips, Lucy felt a warm tear or two fall upon it. At length he spoke:
“Oh, why is this, Lucy?” he said; “your appearance has unmanned me; but I see it and feel it all. I have been sacrificed to ambition, yet I blame you not.”
“No, dear Charles,” she replied; look upon me and then ask yourself who is the victim.”
“But what has happened?” he asked;
“What machinery of hell has been at work to reduce you to this? Fraud, deceit, treachery have done it. But, for the sake of God, let me know, as I said, what has occurred since our last interview to occasion this deplorable change—this rooted sorrow—this awful spirit of despair that I read in your face?
“Not despair, Charles, for I will never yield to that; but it is enough to say, that a barrier deep as the grave, and which only that can remove, is between us forever in this life.”
“You mean to say, then, that you never can be mine?”
“That, alas, is what I mean to say—what I must say.”
“But why, Lucy—why, dearest Lucy—for still I must call you so; what has occasioned this? I cannot understand it.”