oman who has a moderate share of
attractions--at least I did not find it so then. I was really fond of
Julia, too--very fond. I knew her as intimately as any brother knows his
sister. She had kept up a correspondence with me all the time I was at
Guy's, and her letters had been more interesting and amusing than her
conversation generally was. Some women, most cultivated women, can write
charming letters; and Julia was a highly-cultivated woman. I came back
from Guy's with a very greatly-increased regard and admiration for my
cousin Julia.

So, when my mother, with her pleading, wistful eyes, spoke day after day
of Julia, of her dutiful love toward her, and her growing love for me, I
drifted, almost without an effort of my own volition, into an engagement
with her. You see there was no counter-balance. I was acquainted with
every girl on the island of my own class; pretty girls were many of
them, but there was after all not one that I preferred to my cousin. My
old dreams and romances about love, common to every young fellow, had
all faded into a very commonplace, everyday vision of having a
comfortable house of my own, and a wife as good as most other men's
wives. Just in the same way, my ambitious plans of rising to the very
top of the tree in my profession had dwindled down to satisfaction with
the very limited practice of one of our island doctors. I found myself
chained to this rock in the sea; all my future life would probably be
spent there; and Fate offered me Julia as the companion fittest for me.
I was contented with my fate, and laughed off my boyish fancy that I
ought to be ready to barter the world for love.

Added to these two strong ties keeping me in Guernsey, there were the
hundred, the thousand small associations which made that island, and my
people living upon it, dearer than any other place, or any other people,
in the world. Taking the strength of the rope which held me to the
pier-head as represented by one hundred, then my love for my mother
would stand at sixty-six and a half, my engagement to Julia at about
twenty and the remainder may go toward my old associations. That is
pretty nearly the sum of it.

My engagement to Julia came about so easily and naturally that, as I
said, I was perfectly contented with it. We had been engaged since the
previous Christmas, and were to be married in the early summer, as soon
as a trip through Switzerland would be agreeable. We were to set up
housekeeping f