“There is no true love without sacrifice,” came to him as if softly wafted upon the breath of some good angel. “If you truly love Editha Dalton—if it is a pure and unselfish love, you will do right and let her be happy, no matter what the cost is to yourself. Would she respect you? Would she honor you? Would she be proud to call you friend, as she once said, if, convinced of the right, you wilfully do wrong?”
“No,” he said, with uplifted head, and speaking aloud, as if some one had spoken directly to him; “I’ll keep my manhood pure, even though I am beggared by the result.”
A noble spirit of self-abnegation and sacrifice arose within him; the battle was won, but his heart was broken.
Editha Dalton should spend her life without a shadow to mar its brightness, as far as it lay within his power to contribute to that result; and Earle Wayne—a true and noble man he believed him to be, and every way worthy of her priceless love—should have his own without contention.
“Wycliffe will have a noble master,” he murmured; “he will add brightness and honor to the name—perhaps more than I could have done. I will try to bear it patiently; I will give her my blessing with my inheritance, and then, when I come to the crossing ’twixt earth and the great beyond, I can pass over without a regret. I shall have done right and what was my duty.”
He sighed heavily and threw himself upon a couch, as if exhausted with the struggle; and the good angels watching him must have come to comfort him, for almost unconsciously his eyes closed, and sleep wrapped him for the time in the mantle of forgetfulness.
Did they whisper to him that almost divine message from some sweet, mystic pen:
“Oh, fear not in a world like this,
And thou shalt know ere long—
Know how sublime a thing it is