“But why do you insist upon considering yourself a failure?” asked Miss Hill. “You are not old, you have good health, education, ability, the necessary ingredients for achievement.”
“Child, you do not understand. How could you? the ruin is within, not visible on the outer walls.”
“No; I do not understand,” she said.
“I will tell you,” he said, “how I came to be a loiterer in the race, what
“‘——wrought my woe,
In the diamond morning of long ago,’
as the song says. You see I began by asking you about yourself, and, with the artless art that distinguishes you, with scarcely a word, you have switched me off the track I had taken and set me talking about myself instead. I shall lose in your respect after I tell my story, as a matter of course, but I would rather you knew it.
“Years ago, in the days when the earth was new and sweet to me—in the mountain-moving period of life, the tragedy began. I loved, and like the lover of Annabel Lee I may say that the angels of heaven coveted the love of her and me. I was one of the editors of the most prosperous daily newspaper in the city that was my home, my uncle being its proprietor. He had no children of his own, and had brought up my brother and me, our parents having died, when we were very little.
“A sensational criminal trial was before the courts of a distant city, and it was arranged that I was to attend it and send daily letters to my journal. As it promised to last several weeks, the separation from Emma looked unendurable. I must marry her and take her with me. But when I told my plan to her she said she couldn’t leave her father, who was old, feeble and almost blind, with nobody else to care for him. In my selfishness I had forgotten him. ‘I cannot go with you,’ she said, ‘but I am willing to marry you before you go. It will comfort me while you are gone just to know that I am your wife.’
“So we married, telling no one but Emma’s father. The secrecy was needless and foolish, but when young we are all more or less enslaved by the ways of others, and this was too violent a departure from custom to be proclaimed just then.
“Ours was an unusual but not unhappy honey-moon. We wrote every day, long, glowing letters, and annihilated distance with our thought.