"But you will accommodate yourself to any station. My dear, you are young, and know so little about this world, which is such a bugbear to you. Why, there is very little that will be greatly unlike this. At first you might be a little bewildered, but I shall be by you all the time, and you shall feel and fear nothing, and gradually you will learn what little you need to know; and most of all, you will know yourself the best and the loveliest of women. Dear Ivy, I would not part with your sweet, unconscious simplicity for all the accomplishments and acquired elegancies of the finest lady in the world." (That's what men always say.) "You are not ignorant of anything you ought to know, and your ignorance of the world is an additional charm to one who knows so much of its wickedness as I. But we will not talk of it. There is no need. This shall be our home, and here the world will not trouble us."
"And I cannot give up my dear father and mother. They are not like you and your friends"—
"They are my friends, and valued and dear to me, and dearer still they shall be as the parents of my dear little wife"—
"I was going to say"—
"But you shall not say it. I utterly forbid you ever to mention it again. You are mine, all my own. Your friends are my friends, your honor my honor, your happiness my happiness henceforth; and what God joins together let not man or woman put asunder."
"Ah!" whispered Ivy, faintly; for she was yielding, and just beginning to receive the sense of great and unexpected bliss, "but if you should be wrong,—if you should ever repent of this, it is not your happiness alone, but mine, too, that will be destroyed."
Again their relative positions changed, and remained so for a long while.
"Ivy, am I a mere schoolboy to swear eternal fidelity for a week? Have I not been tossing hither and thither on the world's tide ever since you lay in your cradle, and do I not know my position and my power and my habits and love? And knowing all this, do I not know that this dear head"——etc., etc., etc., etc.
But I said I was not going to marry my man and woman, did I not? Nor have I. To be sure, you may have detected premonitory symptoms, but I said nothing about that. I only promised not to marry them, and I have not married them.
It is to be hoped they were married, however. For, on a fine June evening, the setting sun cast a mellow light through the silken curtains of a pleasant chamber, where Ivy lay on a white couch, pale and and still,—very pale and still and statuelike; and by her side, bending over her, with looks of unutterable love, clasping her in his arms, as if to give out of his own heart the life that had so nearly ebbed from hers, pressing upon the closed eyes, the white cheeks, the silent lips kisses of such warmth and tenderness as never thrilled maidenly lips in their rosiest flush of beauty,—knelt Felix Clerron; and when the tremulous life fluttered back again, when the blue eyes slowly opened and smiled up into his with an answering love, his happiness was complete.