"Remorse and despair, both in one," she said; "these must be his portion now, poor Ralph: remorse for having taken my brother's life, and despair for having by his own act placed an impassable bar between us forever. Oh, yes! whatever they may tell me, I know, I feel he loves me still. If he have, indeed, trifled for an hour with this bright and beautiful Hortensia Danvers, when he saw my poor Henry lying on the grass, all his love for Margaret has returned, I am certain. No man can forget the love of early years so easily--at least not Ralph. I know what he will feel, I know what he will think; and sure I am that no one here, not even myself or my father, will weep for poor Henry as bitterly as he does."
Oh! abiding confidence of woman's love, what is like thee? No other passion--no other feeling--no other thought pervades the whole of being, takes possession of every faculty, clings to the heart, rules and subjugates the mind, sets reason, and argument, and conviction at defiance like thee. It must be true love, though not the paltry passion, the half-indifferent liking, the admiration warmed a little by propinquity and habit, the convenient, half mercenary, half ambitious tenderness. None of those lukewarm mixtures of heart and brain, which stand white-gloved and orange-flowered before the altar of a fashionable church, and are recorded under the desecrated name of love, to have that very record blotted out, ere a few short years are over, by the bitter drops of regret or the burning spots of shame. No, no; it must be true, full, wholehearted love--the love that gets a grasp upon the very soul--the love that is immortal as the soul itself.
And such was Margaret's love for her pool cousin. For him she wept as much as for her brother Henry; for she felt and knew that his life was dead if his body lived, and that the fallen man was happier than he whose existence was prolonged.