all a victim to a gamester in life's follies--an actor
indulging a pastime--a mere cheat.

"And what you tell me of your friend's altered circumstances does not
relieve me of such anxieties. The man who has deceived a girl once is
likely to deceive her again. Short of marriage itself, such connections
should be cut off entirely, whatever the price. When they are maintained
in relations of liberty the victim is sure to be further victimized, and
her last state is always worse than the first.

"However, I do not wish to blame anybody, least of all you, who have done
everything for the best, and especially now when I am parting from you
forever. You have never realized how much you have been to me, and I
doubt if I knew it myself until to-day. You know how I was brought
up--with a solitary old man--God be with him!--who tried to be good to me
for the sake of his ambitions, and to love me for the sake of his
revenge. I never knew my mother, I never had a sister, and I can never
have a wife. You were all three to me and yourself besides. There were no
women in our household, and you stood for woman in my life. I have never
told you this before, but now I tell it as a dying man whispers his
secret with his parting breath.

"I have written my letters of farewell--one to my father, asking his
forgiveness if I have done him any wrong; one to my uncle, with my love
and thanks; and one to your good old grandfather, giving up my solemn and
sacred trust of you. My conduct will of course be condemned as weak and
foolish from many points of view, but by my departure some difficulties
will be removed, and for the rest I have come to see that everything is
done by the spirit and nothing by the flesh, and that by prayer and
fasting I can help and protect you more than by counsel and advice. Thus
everything is for the best.

"The rule under which the Brothers live in community forbids them to
write and receive letters without special permission, or even to think
too constantly of the world outside; and now that I am on the eve of that
new life, memories of the old one keep crowding on me as on a drowning
man. But they are all of one period--the days when we were at Peel in
your sweet little island, before the vain and cruel world came in between
us, when you were a simple, merry girl, and I was little more than a
happy boy, and we went plunging and laughing through your bright blue sea
together.

"But earth's joys grow very dim and i