those who knew him
best, but who nevertheless were the companions of many of his
hours,--gave him the credit for such power. Why should a man afflict
himself by the inward burden of an unsatisfied craving, and allow his
heart to sink into his very feet because a girl would not smile when
he wooed her? "If she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she
be!" He had repeated the lines to himself a score of times, and had
been ashamed of himself because he could not make them come true to
himself.

They had not come true in the least. There he was, Arthur Fletcher,
whom all the world courted, with his heart in his very boots! There
was a miserable load within him, absolutely palpable to his outward
feeling,--a very physical pain,--which he could not shake off. As he
threw the stones into the water he told himself that it must be so
with him always. Though the world did pet him, though he was liked at
his club, and courted in the hunting-field, and loved at balls and
archery meetings, and reputed by old men to be a rising star, he told
himself that he was so maimed and mutilated as to be only half a man.
He could not reason about it. Nature had afflicted him with a certain
weakness. One man has a hump;--another can hardly see out of his
imperfect eyes;--a third can barely utter a few disjointed words.
It was his fate to be constructed with some weak arrangement of the
blood-vessels which left him in this plight. "The whole damned thing
is nothing to me," he said bursting out into absolute tears, after
vainly trying to reassure himself by a recollection of the good
things which the world still had in store for him.

Then he strove to console himself by thinking that he might take a
pride in his love even though it were so intolerable a burden to
him. Was it not something to be able to love as he loved? Was it not
something at any rate that she to whom he had condescended to stoop
was worthy of all love? But even here he could get no comfort,--being
in truth unable to see very clearly into the condition of the thing.
It was a disgrace to him,--to him within his own bosom,--that she
should have preferred to him such a one as Ferdinand Lopez, and this
disgrace he exaggerated, ignoring the fact that the girl herself
might be deficient in judgment, or led away in her love by falsehood
and counterfeit attractions. To him she was such a goddess that she
must be right,--and therefore his own inferiority to such a one as
Ferdina