"Calm yourself, my son," said Father Morris in his silky tones, eyeing him with about as much compassion as an angler feels for the writhing of a worm upon his hook. "These bursts of passion are unworthy of you."
"Oh, father!" cried Edmund, softened almost into tears, "you know not how I loved that woman. Your grave, serious feelings, disciplined by the restraint of a cloister, mortified by your renunciation of all earthly pleasures, can form no idea of the depth and fierceness of mine. Your passions, father, are dead within you; subdued by holy penitence to calmness; but mine rage with the fury of a volcano, and destroy me! O that my fond attachment, my long devoted services, my adoration, should be thus rewarded. Yes—my adoration, for I have adored her, father! I worshipped her like a goddess; and though I doted on her charms, and would have endured unheard-of torments to have been blest with their possession, yet, did I not sacrifice my hopes?—did I not relinquish the treasure when just within my grasp, because her happiness was dearer to me than my own? And
