"My poor Ursula!" replied Maurice, "we must submit to what is inevitable. Hitherto you have concealed from them the loss of their little fortune; tell it to them now, as it can not be helped. Try to regulate their expenditure of the little which remains; for, alas! we shall have nothing to give them."
"Go away, and leave them here! Impossible! I tell you, I must work for them!"
"Ursula, my Ursula!" said Maurice, pressing both her hands in his, "do not allow yourself, I conjure you, to be carried away by the first impulse of your generous heart. Reflect for a moment: we do not refuse to give, but we have it not. Even living alone, we shall have to endure many privations."
"I can not leave them," said Ursula, looking mournfully at the two old people slumbering in their arm-chairs.
"Do you not love me, Ursula?" The poor girl only replied by a torrent of tears.
Maurice remained long with her, pouring forth protestations of love, and repeating explanations of their actual position. She listened without replying; and at length he took his leave. Left alone, Ursula leaned her head on her hand, and remained without moving for many hours. Alas! the tardy gloom of happiness which brightened her life for a moment was passing away: the blessed dream was fled never to return! Silence, oblivion, darkness, regained possession of that heart whence love had chased them. During the long midnight hours who can tell what passed in the poor girl's mind? God knew: she never spoke of it.
When day dawned, she shuddered, closed the window, which had remained open during the night, and, trembling from the chill which seized both mind and body, she took paper and pen, and wrote—"Farewell, Maurice! I remain with my father and my mother: they have need of me. To abandon them in their old age would be to cause their death: they have only me in the world. My sister, on her death-bed, confided them to me, saying, 'We shall meet again, Ursula!' If I neglected my duties, I should never see her more. I have loved you well—I shall love you always. You have been very kind, but I know now that we are too poor to marry. Farewell! How hard to write that word! Farewell, dear friend—I knew that happiness was not for me, Ursula."
I went to the old gray house, and so did Maurice; but all our representations were useless—she would not leave her parents. "I must work for them!" she said. In vain I spoke to her of Maurice's love, and, with a sort of cruelty, reminded her of her waning youth, and the improbability of her meeting another husband. She listened, while her tears dropped on the delicate work at which she labored without intermission, and then in a low voice she murmured, "They would die: I must work for them!" She begged us not to tell her mother what had passed. Those for whom she had sacrificed herself remained ignorant of her devotion. Some slight reason was assigned for the breaking off of the marriage, and Ursula resumed her place and her employment near the window, pale, dejected, and bowed down as before.
Maurice d'Erval possessed one of those prudent, deliberating minds which never allow themselves to be carried away by feeling or by impulse. His love had a limit: he prayed and intreated for a time, but at length he grew weary, and desisted.
It happened one day, while Ursula was seated in her window, that she heard a distant sound of military music, and the measured trampling of many feet. It was the regiment departing. Tremblingly she listened to the air, which sounded as a knell in her ears; and when the last faint notes died away in the distance, she let her work fall on her lap, and covered her face with her hands. A few tears trickled between her fingers, but she speedily wiped them away, and resumed her work: she resumed it for the rest of her life. On the evening of this day of separation—this day when the sacrifice was consummated—Ursula, after having bestowed her usual care on her parents, seated herself at the foot of her mother's bed, and, bending toward her with a look, whose tearful tenderness the blind old woman could not know, the poor deserted one took her hand, and murmured softly, "Mother! you love me; do you not? Is not my presence a comfort to you? Would you not grieve to part with me, my mother?"