ese years I had
not found some who did not care for outward advantages. I have dreamed my
sweet love-dream, and it is over, and the roses have grown above my buried
hopes.

Since then I have let one idea fill my life to the exclusion of everything
else, putting away from me all desires and thoughts of other needs; and
that too has left me. I call it an "idea" for lack of a better name. I had
put away all thought of marriage with my bright youth, but took into my
heart instead what I deemed would serve as well--a friendship for another
woman. For ten years we knew no separate life--I thought no separate
hopes. She had loved, been on the eve of marriage, her lover had died:
that was her heart's history, and henceforth the idea of love had fallen
out of both our lives--not the idea only, but the possibility of love. I
thought so--she _said_ so.

I trusted her and loved her with a perfect love. I wound my hopes about
her: I gave up all my life to her as if she had been my lover. I never
cared to form other friendships. I deprived myself of all possibilities of
making other ties of any sort, and with the first opportunity she whistled
me down the wind, and cared no more for me than if she had never professed
to love me. She had been my one bright thing--she was sweet and
winsome--the one golden gleam in my sombre life. My future was bound up in
her so completely that when she severed the fine, close cords (brittle,
yet so strong) which had bound us together for years, she cut into my
heart--nay more, wrested from me all my sweet trusts and faiths. If she is
false, who else in all God's earth is true? I pity myself very much. You,
of course, will not see why her marrying should make a difference if we
loved, and will call me selfish. Not so, not so! She might have married as
soon as it pleased her, and I should have been glad. It would have made a
difference, of course: she must in some sort have been parted from me, but
that I could have borne if it made her happy. But from her acceptance of
her lover--about whom we will say nothing, save that he was the sort of
man she had always held in abhorrence--she has coolly ignored my right to
any part or lot in her fate. She had told me (or I, poor fool! thought so)
every hope and fear of her life: now she told me what she chose, and was
astonished that I expected more--hurt that I seemed changed and did not
find my friendship flourish on crumbs after being nourished for years from