"
He had spoken in a harsh, cynical tone, and Lionel had turned cold at
his words. He stood a long while in silence there, turning them over in
his mind and considering the riddle which they presented him. He
thought of asking his brother bluntly for the key to it, for the precise
meaning of his disconcerting statement, but courage failed him. He
feared lest Sir 0liver should confirm his own dread interpretation of
it.
He drew away after a time, and soon after went to bed. For days
thereafter the phrase rankled in his mind--"I can throw off the burden
when I will." Conviction grew upon him that Sir Oliver meant that he
was enheartened by the knowledge that by speaking if he choose he could
clear himself. That Sir Oliver would so speak he could not think.
Indeed, he was entirely assured that Sir Oliver was very far from
intending to throw off his burden. Yet he might come to change his
mind. The burden might grow too heavy, his longings for Rosamund too
clamorous, his grief at being in her eyes her brother's murderer too
overwhelming.
Lionel's soul shuddered to contemplate the consequences to himself. His
fears were self-revelatory. He realized how far from sincere had been
his proposal that they should tell the truth; he perceived that it had
been no more than the emotional outburst of the moment, a proposal which
if accepted he must most bitterly have repented. And then came the
reflection that if he were guilty of emotional outbursts that could so
outrageously play the traitor to his real desires, were not all men
subject to the same? Might not his brother, too, come to fall a prey to
one of those moments of mental storm when in a climax of despair he
would find his burden altogether too overwhelming and in rebellion cast
it from him?
Lionel sought to assure himself that his brother was a man of stern
fibres, a man who never lost control of himself.
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