Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/79

 remorse. The singularity of his birth had made her regard this being as more intimately her brother than would have happened in different circumstances; it was her obstinate persuasion that their fates were blended. The rumour of his death she had never credited; it was a topic of congratulation to her friends, but of mourning and distress to her. That he would one day reappear upon the stage, and assume the dignity of virtue, was a source of consolation with which she would never consent to part.

"Her character was now known. When the doom of exile was pronounced upon him, she deemed it incumbent on her to vindicate herself from aspersions founded on misconceptions of her motives in refusing her interference. The manuscript, though unpublished, was widely circulated; none could resist her simple and touching eloquence, nor rise from the perusal without resigning his heart to the most impetuous impulses of admiration, and enlisting himself among the eulogists of her justice and her fortitude. This was the only monument, in a written form, of her genius: as such, it was engraven on my memory; the picture that it described was the perpetual companion of my thoughts.

"Alas! it had perhaps been well for me if it had been buried in eternal oblivion! I read in it the condemnation of my deed, the agonies she was preparing to suffer, and the indignation that would overflow upon the author of so signal a calamity.

"I had rescued my life by the sacrifice of his; whereas I should have died. Wretched and precipitate Coward! What had become of my boasted gratitude? Such was the zeal that I had vowed to her—such the services which it was the business of my life to perform! I had snatched her brother from existence—I had torn from her the hope which she so ardently and indefatigably cherished—from a contemptible and dastardly regard to my own safety, I had failed in the moment of trial, and when called upon by Heaven to evince the sincerity of my professions!

"She had treated my professions lightly; my vows of eternal devotion she had rejected with lofty