Hurrah for it! Present my humble warm respects to your aunt
Dorothy. I pray to heaven nightly for one of its angels on earth. Kunst,
Wissenschaft, Ehre, Liebe. Die Liebe. Quick at the German poets. Frau:
Fraulein. I am actually dazzled at the prospect of our future. To be
candid, I no longer see to write. Gruss' dich herzlich. From Vienna to
you next. Lebe wohl!'

My aunt Dorothy sent a glance at the letter while I was folding it
evidently thinking my unwillingness to offer it a sign of bad news or
fresh complications. She spoke of Miss Penrhys.

'Oh! that's over,' said I. 'Heiresses soon get consoled.'

She accused me of having picked up a vulgar idea. I maintained that it
was my father's.

'It cannot be your father's,' said she softly; and on affirming that he
had uttered it and written it, she replied in the same tone, more
effective than the ordinary language of conviction, 'He does not think
it.'

The rage of a youth to prove himself in the right of an argument was
insufficient to make me lay the letter out before other eyes than my own,
and I shrank from exposing it to compassionate gentle eyes that would
have pleaded similar allowances to mine for the wildness of the style. I
should have thanked, but despised the intelligence of one who framed my
excuses for my father, just as the squire, by abusing him, would have
made me a desperate partisan in a minute. The vitality of the delusion I
cherished was therefore partly extinct; not so the love; yet the love of
him could no longer shake itself free from oppressive shadows.

Out of his circle of attraction books were my resource.

CHAPTER XXIII

MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY

Books and dreams, like the two rivers cited by my father, flowed side by
side in me without mixing; and which the bright Rhone was, which the
brown Arve, needs not to be told to those who know anything of youth;
they were destined to intermingle soon enough. I read well, for I felt
ground and had mounting views; the real world, and the mind and passions
of the world, grew visible to me. My tutor pleased the squire immensely
by calling me matter-of-fact. In philosophy and history I hated
speculation; but nothing was too fantastic for my ideas of possible
occurrences. Once away from books, I carried a head that shot rockets to
the farthest hills.

My dear friend Temple was at sea, or I should have had one near me to
detect and control the springs of nonsense. I was deemed a remarkably