THE SMUGGLER. 285 



without feeling, without heart. His reasons, too, are specious, 

 my dear child. His son, it seems, has taken part this morning 

 in a smuggling affray with the troops ; blood has been shed, some 

 of the soldiers have been killed, all who have had a share 

 therein are guilty of felony; and it has become necessary that 

 the young man should be hurried out of the country without 

 delay. To him such a flight is nothing: he has no family to 

 blacken with the record of crime, he has no honourable name 

 to stain, his means are all prepared; his flight is easy, his 

 escape secure ; but his father insists that you shall be his bride 

 before he goes, or he gives your father up, not to justice, but 

 to the law; which in pretending to administer justice, but too 

 often commits the very crime it seems to punish. Four short 

 days are all that he allows, and then you are to be that 

 youth's bride." 



" What! the bride of a felon!'' cried Edith, her spirit rising 

 for a moment, " of one stained with every vice and every crime; 

 to vow falsely that I will love him whom I must ever hate ; to 

 break all my promises to one I must ever love; to deceive, 

 prove false and forsworn to the noble and the true, and give 

 myself to the base, the lawless, and the abhorred! Oh, my 

 father, my father! is it possible that you can ask such a 

 thing?" 



The fate of Sir Robert Croyland and his daughter hung in 

 the balance. One harsh command, one unkind word, with 

 justice and truth on her side, and feebleness and wrong on his, 

 might have armed her to resist; but the old man's heart was 

 melted. The struggle that he witnessed in his child was, for 

 a moment remark, only for a moment more terrible than 

 that within his own breast. There was something in the in- 

 nocence and truth, something in the higher attributes of the 

 passions called into action in her breast, something in the enno- 

 bling nature of the conflicting feelings of her heart: the filial 

 tenderness, the adherence to her engagements, the abhorrence 

 of the bad, the love of the good, the truth, the honour, and 

 the piety, all striving one with the other, that for a time made 

 the mean passion of fear seem small and insignificant. " I do 

 not ask you, my child,'' he said, "I do not urge you; I ask, I 

 urge you no more! The worst bitterness is past. I have 

 told my own child the tale of my sorrows, my folly, my weak- 

 ness, and my danger. I have inflicted the worst upon you, Edith, 



