have heard, or yet hear, to the discredit of my former life? You will not send me and my grandchild forth from our obscure refuge to confront a world with which we have no strength to cope? And, believing this, it only remains for me to say fare- you-well, Sir."
"I should deserve to lose spe—spe—speech altogether," cried the Oxonian, gasping and stammering fearfully as he caught Waife firmly by the arm, " if I suffered—suff—suff—suff—"
"One, two! take time. Sir!" said the Comedian, softly. And with sweet patience he reseated himself on the bank.
The Oxonian threw himself at length by the outcast's side; and with the noble tenderness of a nature as chivalrously Christian as Heaven ever gave to priest, he rested his folded hands upon Waife's shoulder, and looking him full and close in the face, said thus, slowly, deliberately, not a stammer:
"You do not guess what you have done for me; you have secured to me a home and a career—the wife of whom I must otherwise have despaired—the divine vocation on which all my earthly hopes were set, and which I was on the eve of renouncing—do not think these are obligations which can be lightly shaken off. If there are circumstances which forbid me to disabuse others of impressions which wrong you, imagine not that their false notions will affect my own gratiiude—my own respect for you!"
"Nay, Sir! they ought—they must. Perhaps not your ex- aggerated gratitude for a service which you should not, however, measure by its effects on yourself, but by the slightness of the trouble it gave to me; not perhaps your gratitude—but your respect, yes."
"I tell you no! Do you fancy that I cannot judge of a man's nature without calling on him to trust me with all his secrets— all the errors, if you will, of his past life? Will not the calling to which I may now hold myself destined give me power and commandment to absolve all those who truly repent and un- feignedly believe? Oh, Mr. Waife! if in earlier days you have sinned, do you not repent? and how often, in many a lovely gentle sentence dropped unawares from your lips, have I had cause to know that you unfeignedly believe! Were I now clothed with sacred authority, could I not absolve you as a priest? Think you that, in the meanwhile, I dare judge you as a man? I—life's new recruit, guarded hitherto from temptation by careful parents and favoring fortune—/presume to judge, and judge harshly, the gray-haired veteran, wearied by the march, wounded in the battle!"
