disappointed in the only
motive of assisting him--the honorable wooing of his daughter?"

She felt her pride rising.

"Your father's debts to me are tens of thousands of dollars," continued
Milburn. "Do you ask me to present that sum to you, and retire to my
loneliness out of this bright light of home and family, warmth and
music, that you have made? That is the test you put my love to:
banishment from you. Will you ask it?"

"I have not asked for your money, sir," said Vesta. "Yet I have heard of
Love doing as much as that, relieving the anguish of its object, and
finding sufficient joy in the self-denying deed."

"I do not think you personally know of any such case, though you may
have read it in a novel or tract. Men have died, and left a fortune they
could no longer keep, to some cherished lady; or they have made a
considerable sacrifice for a beautiful and noble woman; but where did
you ever hear, Miss Vesta, of a famished lover, surrendering every
endowment that might win the peerless one, to be himself returned to his
sorrow, tortured still by love, and by his neighbors ridiculed? What
would Princess Anne say of me? That I had been made a fool of, and hurl
new epithets after my hat?"

Vesta searched her mind, thinking she must alight upon some such example
there, but none suited the case. Meshach took advantage of her silence:

"The gifts of a lover are everywhere steps to love, as I have
understood. He makes his impression with them; they are expected.
Nothing creates happiness like a gift, and it is an old saying that
blessings await him who gives, and also her who takes, and that to seek
and ask and knock are praiseworthy."

"Oh," said Vesta, "but to be _bought_, Mr. Milburn? To be weighed
against a father's debts--is it not degrading?"

"Not where such respect and cherishing as mine will be. Rather exalt
yourself as more valuable to a miser than his whole lendings, and
greater than all your father's losses as an equivalent, and even then
putting your husband in debt, being so much richer than his account."

"Where will be my share of love in this world, married so?" asked Vesta.
"To love is the globe itself to a woman, her youth the mere atmosphere
thereof, her widowhood the perfume of that extinguished star; and all my
mind has been alert to discover the image I shall serve, the bright
youth ready for me, looking on one after another to see if it might be
he, and suddenly you hold between me and m