head, and gazed eagerly on her father: her cheek was warm, with colour more lovely from its extreme delicacy; her eyes lighted up with the eloquence of excited emotion; and every feature was animated with the impassioned and beautiful feelings of the moment. She looked lovely; and Lord Norbourne, for an instant, forgot the under current of self-reproach, which, though he would not have owned, yet made itself only too forcibly felt within.
"Do I love you?" said he, in answer to her touching appeal: "deeply and dearly, my last, my only child. I have, Heaven knows, nothing to pardon in one who has always been so patient, so sweet, and so good. No, my dearest and gentlest, it is you who must forgive, if, taken up with the cares of the world, in projects that looked only to the future, I have forgotten the womanly tenderness due to an orphan girl: yet you are, you have been, very dear to me, my own sweet Constance."
His voice faltered; for affections, undisturbed for years, swelled within him. Every kindly and warm emotion was awakened,
