"There are a hundred reasons. Why speak so mysteriously of one?"
"Because it is the strongest, and in some wise mysterious. I am doomed, Herrick. I have been warned that I had best prepare myself for the grave. I have but a short time to live."
"What a foolish fancy! And from whom comes the mysterious warning? From your familiar, Vincenti?"
"Not from him. He promises me length of days, if I will but school myself to the adept's scanty regimen. My warning came from a Higher Source, and from an authority I cannot question. Do not let us discuss the matter, Herrick. It allows of no argument, and is too sacred for question. It is enough for you to know that I have been warned. My days have shrunk to the briefest space. I am not a man to spoil any woman's life."
"You have had some mysterious dream? You were ever a dreamer."
"Yes, I have had a dream."
"'Twas your guardian angel sent the vision if it can deter you from contemplated evil. By heaven, Jack, I believe every man has his Pacolet, his guardian and friend, for ever trying to save him from his own baser inclinations."
"Yet that friendly guardian spirit of whom poor Dick Steele wrote so pleasantly was, after all, but a feeble protector, and was impotent against human folly and self-will. I believe, Herrick, that in most men there is an innate respect for virtue, accompanied by a natural leaning towards vice. Mind and conscience pull one way—heart and senses tug the other; and in most cases the flesh and the Devil get the victory. And now will you do me this favour—will you save Judith from me, and me from myself?"
"I will do anything in this world to so holy an end."
"Then you will go to Judith this evening at dusk, when Mr. Topsparkle is to be in the City, and you will give her a letter from me. You will sustain that letter by whatever moral lecture you may feel moved to deliver; and you will so act that she will understand that, though my passion is unchanged, my resolution is irrevocable. Say nothing of an early doom; for did she know my motive, her generosity would be eager for self-sacrifice—she would be in haste to fling herself away upon a dying man. Let me even appear to her a coward, a prig, a pious renegade from love and fidelity—anything, so that you save her from the ruin we had planned."