“You make a chaos of my little world,” she murmured at length.
“No,” said I, “your world is untouched. If it should never be my good fortune to enter it, you are not to grieve. You are free, Miss Preston, free as this sunshiny air we breathe; I alone am bound, and that because I must be whether I will or no.”
Then I saw the woman I had worshipped in this young fair girl shine fully and fairly upon me. Drawing herself up, she looked me in the face and calmly laid her hand in mine. “I am young,” said she, “and do not know what may be right to say to one so generous and so kind. But this much I can promise, that whether or not I am ever able to duly reward you for what you undertake, I will at least make it the study of my life never to prove unworthy of so much trust and devotion.”
And with the last lingering look natural to a parting for years, we separated then and there, and the crowd came between us, and the Sunday bells rang on, and what was so vividly real to us at the moment, became in remembrance more like the mist and shadow of a dream.
VII.
MRS. SYLVESTER.
Love is more pleasant than marriage, for the same reason that romances are more amusing than history.—Chamfort.
“He draweth out the thread of his verbosity, finer than the staple of his argument.”—Loves Labor Lost.
Young Mandeville having finished his story, looked at his uncle. He found him sitting in an attitude of extreme absorption, his right arm stretched before him on the table, his face bent thoughtfully downwards and clouded with that deep melancholy that seemed its most natural expression, “He has not heard me,” was the young man’s first mortifying reflection. But catching his uncle’s eye which at that moment raised itself, he perceived he was mistaken and that he had rather been listened to only too well.