Do not,
my dear son Edward, permit this bloody prejudice to master your mind.
I cannot ask you to think of the crime supposed as if the blood
spilled had been less dear to you--Alas! I know that is impossible.
But I do require you, in proportion to your interest in the supposed
sufferer, (for as yet the whole is matter of supposition,) to bear on
your mind the evidence on which the guilt of the accused person must
be tried. He hath spoken with me, and I confess his tale is so
extraordinary, that I should have, without a moment's hesitation,
rejected it as incredible, but that an affair which chanced to myself
in this very glen--More of that another time--Suffice it for the
present to say, that from what I have myself experienced, I deem it
possible, that, extraordinary as Sir Piercie Shafton's story may seem,
I hold it not utterly impossible."
"Father," said Edward Glendinning, when he saw that his preceptor
paused, unwilling farther to explain upon what grounds he was inclined
to give a certain degree of credit to Sir Piercie Shafton's story,
while he admitted it as improbable--"Father to me you have been in
every sense. You know that my hand grasped more readily to the book
than to the sword; and that I lacked utterly the ready and bold spirit
which distinguished----" Here his voice faltered, and he paused for a
moment, and then went on with resolution and rapidity--"I would say,
that I was unequal to Halbert in promptitude of heart and of hand; but
Halbert is gone, and I stand his representative, and that of my
father--his successor in all his rights," (while he said this his eyes
shot fire,) "and bound to assert and maintain them as he would have
done--therefore I am a changed man, increased in courage as in my
rights and pretensions.
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