presence, and, it might be, less perilous. At least he could
be quiet there. His mind traveled back to a by-gone incident of his
parochial life, when he had found a wretched shop-boy crouching by the
water's edge, and trying to screw his courage up for the final plunge.
It was a sordid little tragedy--an honest lad was caught in the toils of
some slatternly Jezebel; she had made him steal for her, had spent his
spoil, and then deserted him for his "pal"--his own familiar friend.
Adrift on the world, beggared in character and fortune, and sore to the
heart, he had wandered to the edge of the water, and listened to its
low-voiced promises of peace. Stafford had stretched forth his hand to
pluck him from his doom and set him on his feet; he prevailed on the lad
to go home in his company, and the course of a few days proved once
again that despair may be no more enduring than delight. The incident
had almost faded from his memory, but it revived now as he stood and
looked on the water, and he recognized with a start the depths to which
he was in danger of falling. The invitation of the water could not draw
him to it till he knew Claudia's will. But if she failed him, was not
that the only thing left? His desire had swallowed up his life, and
seemed to point to death as the only alternative to its own
satisfaction. He contemplated this conclusion, not with the personal
interest of a man who thought he might be called to act upon
it,--Claudia would rescue him from that,--but with a theoretical
certainty that if by any chance the staff on which he leant should
break, he would be in no other mind than that from which he had rescued
his miserable shop-boy. Death for love's sake was held up in poetry and
romance as a thing in some sort noble and honorable; as a man might die
because he could not save his country, so might he because he could not
please his lady-love. In old days, Stafford, rigidly repressing his
aesthetic delight in such literature, had condemned its teaching with
half-angry contempt, and enough of his former estimate of things
remained to him to prevent him regarding such a state of mind as it
pictured as a romantic elevation rather than a hopeless degradation of a
man's being. But although he still condemned, now he understood, if not
the defense of such an attitude, at least the existence of it. He might
still think it a folly; it no longer appeared a figment. A sin it was,
no doubt, and a degradation, but not
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