Consider your whole happiness rests on one step! Pause, examine, compare! Remember, you have not of Aram, as of those whom you have hitherto mixed with, the eye-witness of a life! You can know but little of his real temper, his secret qualities; still less of the tenor of his former life.

I only ask of you, for your own sake, for my sake, your sister's sake, and your good father's, not to judge too rashly! Love him, if you will; but observe him!" "Have you done ?" said Madeline, who had hitherto with difficulty contained herself; "then hear me.

Was it I?
was it Madeline Lester whom you asked to play the watch, to enact the spy upon the man whom she exults in loving?
Was it not enough that you should descend to mark down each incautious look--to chronicle every heedless word--to draw dark deductions from the unsuspecting confidence of my father's friend--to lie in wait--to hang with a foe's malignity upon the unbendings of familiar intercourse--to extort anger from gentleness itself, that you might wrest the anger into crime! Shame, shame upon you, for the meanness! And must you also suppose that I, to whose trust he has given his noble heart, will receive it only to play the eavesdropper to its secrets?
Away!" The generous blood crimsoned the cheek and brow of this high-spirited girl as she uttered her galling reproof; her eyes sparkled, her lip quivered, her whole frame seemed to have grown larger with the majesty of indignant love.
"Cruel, unjust, ungrateful!" ejaculated Walter, pale with rage, and trembling under the conflict of his roused and wounded feelings.

"Is it thus you answer the warning of too disinterested and self-forgetful a love ?" "Love!" exclaimed Madeline.

"Grant me patience!--Love! It was but now I thought myself honoured by the affection you said you bore me.