"An heiress to a good name, Daisy! which is better than purple, and linen, and fine gold."
Daisy looks mystified, but forbears to question him, for he complains of sleep. The lovers part at the head of the stairs. Mortimer, on reaching his room, draws a paper from his bosom; he weeps over it, reads it again and again; then he holds it in the flame of a candle. When the ashes have fallen at his feet, he exclaims:
"I have kept my promise, Harvey Snarle! Peace to your memory!"
From a writing-desk in a corner of the room he takes a pile of manuscript, and weary as he is, adds several pages to it. The dream of his boyhood has grown with him—that delightful dream of authorship! How this will-o'-the-wisp of the brain entices one into mental fogs! How it coaxes and pets one, cheats and ruins one! And so that appalling pile of closely-written manuscript is Mortimer's romance? Wasted hours and wasted thought—who would buy or read it?
A down-town clock strikes the hour of two so gently, that it sounds like the tinkling of sheep-bells coming through the misty twilight air from the green meadows. With which felicitous simile we will give our hero a little sleep, after having kept him up two hours after midnight.
Slumber touches his eyelids gently; but Daisy lies awake for hours; at last, falling into a trouble sleep, she dreams that she is an heiress.
Oh, Daisy Snarle!