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 not state, not fortune, not rank,—but life itself! but simple existence!"—

"Very wonderful personage!" cried Sir Jaspar, his air mingling reverence with amazement; "and what,—unfold to me, I beg, what is the necromancy through which you support, under such toils, your intellectual dignity? and strangle, in its birth, every struggle of false shame?"

"Alas, Sir, I have seen guilt!—Since then, I have thought that shame belonged to nothing else!"

The eyes of Sir Jaspar were now suffused with tender admiration. "Fair deity of the counter!" he cried, "you are sublime! And she, too,—your witching little handmaid; by what kind, dulcet chance,—new in the annals of misfortune,—have two such wonders met?—"

"Ah, rather, Sir,—since you couple us so kindly,—rather ask by what adverse chance we have so long been separated?"