Placing
her beside him upon the seat he had occupied, he tenderly rebuked her
gloomy manner, while an inward and painful consciousness of its cause
gave to his voice a hesitating tremor, and his eye, heretofore
unquailing at any glance, no longer bold, now shrank downcast before the
tearful emphasis of hers.
"You have come, Kate--come, according to your promise, yet you wear not
loving looks. Your eye is vacant--your heart, it beats sadly and
hurriedly beneath my hand, as if there were gloomy and vexatious
thoughts within."
"And should I not be sad, Mark, and should you not be sad? Gloom and
sorrow befit our situations alike; though for you I feel more than for
myself. I think not so much of our parting, as of your misfortune in
having partaken of this crime. There is to me but little occasion for
grief in the temporary separation which I am sure will precede our final
union. But this dreadful deed, Mark--it is this that makes me sad. The
knowledge that you, whom I thought too gentle wantonly to crush the
crawling insect, should have become the slayer of men--of innocent men,
too--makes my heart bleed within, and my eyes fill; and when I think of
it, as indeed I now think of little else, and feel that its remorse and
all its consequences must haunt you for many years, I almost think, with
my father, that it would be better we should see each other no more.
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