If we forgive all things to old age, so much the more surely do we
forgive all injuries to the fading enemy. That she had suffered much
cruelty and neglect at the hands of her father, was a fact that Diana
could not forget, any more than she could forget the name which he had
given her. It was a part of her life not to be put off or done away with.
But in these last days, with all her heart she forgave and pitied him.
She pitied him for the crooked paths into which his feet had wandered at
the very outset of life, and from which so weak a soul could find no
issue. She pitied him for that moral blindness which had kept him
pleasantly unconscious of the supreme depth of his degradation--a social
Laplander, who never having seen a western summer, had no knowledge that
his own land was dark and benighted.
Happily for Diana and her generous lover, the Captain was not a
difficult penitent. He was indeed a man who, having lost the capacity
and the need for sin, took very kindly to penitence, as a species of
sentimental luxury.
"Yes, my dear," he said complacently--for even in the hour of his
penitence he insisted on regarding himself as a social martyr--"my life
has been a very hard one. Fortune has not been kind to me. In the words
of the immortal bard, my lines have _not_ been set in pleasant places. I
should have been glad if Providence had allowed me to be a better father
to you, a better husband to your poor mother--a better Christian, in
fact--and had spared me the repeated humiliation of going through the
Insolvent Debtors' Court.
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