III) ***




Produced by Al Haines.




[Illustration: Cover]




                             CLARA VAUGHAN

                               _A NOVEL_


                            IN THREE VOLUMES
                                VOL III.

                            R. D. Blackmore



                         London and Cambridge:
                           MACMILLAN AND CO.
                                 1864.

        _The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved._




                                LONDON:
                  R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS,
                           BREAD STREET HILL.




                             CLARA VAUGHAN

                        BOOK IV.  (_continued_).



                               CHAPTER X.

                        STORY OF EDGAR VAUGHAN.


Child Clara, for your own dear sake, as well as mine and my sweet
love's, I will not dwell on that tempestuous time.  If you cannot
comprehend it without words, no words will enable you.  If you can, and
I fear you do, no more words are wanted; and, as an old man weary of the
world, I know not whether to envy or to pity you.

Hither and thither I was flung, to the zenith star of ecstasy or the
nadir gulf of agony, according as my idol pet chose to smile or frown.
Though she was no silly child, but a girl of mind and feeling, she had a
store, I must confess, of clouds as well as dazzling sunlight in the
empyrean of her eyes.  Her nature, like my love, was full of Southern
passion.  It is like the air they breathe, the beauty they behold. One
minute of such love compresses in a thunder flood all the slow emotions
stealing through the drought-scrimped channel, where we dredge for gold
deposits, through ten years of Saxon courtship.  Instead of Lily-bloom,
she should have been called the Passion-flower