anaesthetic he must have, if he holds his grief fast tied to his
heart-strings. But as grief must be fed with thought, or starve to
death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in other ways that
it has no time to attend to the wants of that ravening passion. To sit
down and passively endure it, is apt to end in putting all the mental
machinery into disorder.

Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already fought,
and that he had conquered. He believed that he had subdued himself
completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow of
disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had
assigned him in his companion, and share with it all of his own larger
being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of apprehending.

He had deceived himself. The battle was not fought and won. There had
been a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the
enemy--intrenched in the very citadel of life--had rallied, and would
make another desperate attempt to retrieve his defeat.

The haste with which the young man had quitted the village was only a
proof that he felt his danger. He believed that, if he came into the
presence of Myrtle Hazard for the third time, he should be no longer
master of his feelings. Some explanation must take place between them,
and how was it possible that it should be without emotion? and in what
do all emotions shared by a young man with such a young girl as this
tend to find their last expression?

Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work. He would give
himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams of what might have been.
His plans were never so carefully finished, and his studies were never
so continuous as now. But the passion still wrought within him, and, if
he drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep until he could
endure it no longer, and must give it some manifestation. He had covered
up the bust of Liberty so closely, that not an outline betrayed itself
through the heavy folds of drapery in which it was wrapped. His thoughts
recurred to his unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he
could find a silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was
torture to keep imprisoned in his soul. The cold stone would tell them,
but without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of
himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered from
a presence which, lovely as it was, stood b