“No; she has more fortitude than we might suppose. Heaven knows how that fortitude has supported mine. I have promised to write to her often.”
Harley took two strides across the lawn, and then, coming back to Leonard, said, “Keep your promise, and write often for the first year. I would then ask you to let the correspondence drop gradually.”
“Drop! Ah, my Lord!”
“Look you, my young friend, I wish to lead this fair mind wholly from the sorrows of the past. I wish Helen to enter, not abruptly, but step by step, into a new life. You love each other now, as do two children,—as brother and sister. But later, if encouraged, would the love be the same? And is it not better for both of you that youth should open upon the world with youth’s natural affections free and unforestalled?”
“True! And she is so above me,” said Leonard, mournfully.
“No one is above him who succeeds in your ambition, Leonard. It is not that, believe me.”
Leonard shook his head.
“Perhaps,” said Harley, with a smile, “I rather feel that you are above me. For what vantage-ground is so high as youth? Perhaps I may become jealous of you. It is well that she should learn to like one who is to be henceforth her guardian and protector. Yet how can she like me as she ought, if her heart is to be full of you?”
The boy bowed his head; and Harley hastened to change the subject, and speak of letters and of glory. His words were eloquent and his voice kindling; for he had been an enthusiast for fame in his boyhood, and in Leonard’s his own seemed to him to revive. But the poet’s heart gave back no echo,—suddenly it seemed void and desolate. Yet when Leonard walked back by the moonlight, he muttered to himself, “Strange, strange, so mere a child! this cannot be love! Still, what else to love is there left to me?”
And so he paused upon the bridge where he had so often stood with Helen, and on which he had found the protector that had given to her a home, to himself a career. And life seemed very long, and fame but a dreary phantom. Courage still, Leonard! These are the sorrows of the heart that teach thee more than all the precepts of sage and critic.