ed in mute
surprise, but his emotion awakened her own; her tender woman's heart
yearned to console. Unconsciously her arm rested on his less lightly.

"Deeply, and for sorrow. It is a long tale, that may be told hereafter.
The worldly would call my love a madness. I did not reason on it then, I
cannot reason on it now. Enough: death smote suddenly, terribly, and
to me, mysteriously, her whom I loved. The love lived on. Fortunately,
perhaps, for me, I had quick distraction, not to grief, but to its inert
indulgence. I was a soldier; I joined our armies. Men called me brave.
Flattery! I was a coward before the thought of life. I sought death:
like sleep, it does not come at our call. Peace ensued. As when the
winds fall the sails droop, so when excitement ceased, all seemed to me
flat and objectless. Heavy, heavy was my heart. Perhaps grief had been
less obstinate, but that I feared I had causes for self-reproach. Since
then I have been a wanderer, a self-made exile. My boyhood had been
ambitious,--all ambition ceased. Flames, when they reach the core of the
heart, spread, and leave all in ashes. Let me be brief: I did not mean
thus weakly to complain,--I to whom Heaven has given so many blessings!
I felt, as it were, separated from the common objects and joys of men. I
grew startled to see how, year by year, wayward humours possessed me.
I resolved again to attach myself to some living heart--it was my sole
chance to rekindle my own. But the one I had loved remained as my type
of woman, and she was different from all I saw. Therefore I said to
myself, 'I will rear from childhood some young fresh life, to grow up
into my ideal.' As this thought began to haunt me, I chanced to discover
you. Struck with the romance of your early life, touched by your
courage, charmed by your affectionate nature, I said to myself, 'Here is
what I seek.' Helen, in assuming the guardianship of your 'Life, in all
the culture which I have sought to bestow on your docile childhood, I
repeat, that I have been but the egotist. And now, when you have reached
that age when it becomes me to speak, and you to listen; now, when
you are under the sacred roof of my own mother; now I ask you, can you
accept this heart, such as wasted years, and griefs too fondly nursed,
have left it? Can you be, at least, my comforter? Can you aid me to
regard life as a duty, and recover those aspirations which once soared
from the paltry and miserable confines of our frivo