"Believe it, without asking me to explain," answered Harley.
For he did not judge it necessary to say to Leonard: "I am high-born and wealthy, you a peasant's son, and living by your exertions. This woman is ambitious and distressed. She might have projects on me that would counteract mine on her. You she would but listen to, and receive, through the sentiments of good or of poetical that are in her; you she would have no interest to subjugate, no motive to ensnare."
"And now," said Harley, turning the subject, "I have another object in view. This foolish sage friend of ours, in his bewilderment and fears, has sought to save Violante from one rogue by promising her hand to a man who, unless my instincts deceive me, I suspect much disposed to be another. Sacrifice such exuberance of life and spirit to that bloodless heart, to that cold and earthward intellect! By Heaven, it shall not be!"
"But whom can the exile possibly have seen of birth and fortunes to render him a fitting spouse for his daughter? Whom, my Lord, except yourself?"
"Me!" exclaimed Harley, angrily, and changing colour. "I worthy of such a creature?—-I, with my habits! I, silken egotist that I am! And you, a poet, to form such an estimate of one who might be the queen of a poet's dreasn!"
"My Lord, when we sat the other night round Riccabocca's hearth, when I heard her speak, and observed you listen, I said to myself, from such knowledge of human nature as comes, we know not how, to us poets,—I said, 'Harley L'Estrange has looked long and wistfully on the heavens, and he now hears the murmur of the wings that can waft him towards them.' And then I sighed, for I thought how the world rules us all in spite of ourselves, and I said, 'What pity for both, that the exile's daughter is not the worldly equal of the peer's son!' And you too sighed, as I thus thought; and I fancied that, while you listened to the music of the wing, you felt the iron of the chain. But the exile's daughter is your equal in birth, and you are her equal in heart and in soul."
"My poor Leonard, you rave," answered Harley, calmly. "And if Violante is not to be some young prince's bride, she should be some young poet's."
"Poet's! Oh, no!" said Leonard, with a gentle laugh. "Poets need repose where they love!"
Harley was struck by the answer, and mused over it in silence. "I comprehend," thought he; "it is a new light that dawns on me. What is needed by the man whose whole life is one strain after glory—whose soul sinks, in fatigue, to the companionship of earth—is not the love of a nature like his own. He is right,—it is repose! While I!—it is true; boy that he is, his intuitions are wiser than all my experience! It is excitement, energy, elevation, that Love should bestow on me. But I have chosen; and, at least, with Helen my life will be calm, and my hearth sacred. Let the rest sleep in the same grave as my youth."
"But," said Leonard, wishing kindly to arouse his noble friend from a revery which he felt was mournful, though he did not divine its true cause,—"but you have not yet told me the name of the signorina's suitor. May I know?"