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child--tears unbidden now filled her eyes. She tried to disperse them,
but they refused to be checked--her utterance was choaked. She had not
wept before. Raymond could not resist these signs of distress: he felt
perhaps somewhat ashamed of the part he acted of the injured man, he who
was in truth the injurer. And then he devoutly loved Perdita; the bend of
her head, her glossy ringlets, the turn of her form were to him subjects of
deep tenderness and admiration; as she spoke, her melodious tones entered
his soul; he soon softened towards her, comforting and caressing her, and
endeavouring to cheat himself into the belief that he had never wronged
her.
Raymond staggered forth from this scene, as a man might do, who had been
just put to the torture, and looked forward to when it would be again
inflicted. He had sinned against his own honour, by affirming, swearing to,
a direct falsehood; true this he had palmed on a woman, and it might
therefore be deemed less base--by others--not by him;--for whom had
he deceived?--his own trusting, devoted, affectionate Perdita, whose
generous belief galled him doubly, when he remembered the parade of
innocence with which it had been exacted. The mind of Raymond was not so
rough cast, nor had been so rudely handled, in the circumstance of life, as
to make him proof to these considerations--on the contrary, he was all
nerve; his spirit was as a pure fire, which fades and shrinks from every
contagion of foul atmosphere: but now the contagion had become incorporated
with its essence, and the change was the more painful. Truth and falsehood,
love and hate lost their eternal boundaries, heaven rushed in to mingle
with hell; while his sensitive mind, turned to a field for such battle, was
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