was too much!

I do not think I had ever felt my own happiness so exquisitely as I
did upon that day which was to see the last of it. I was to go
a-Maying with her who had ever been as my own soul, since we were
children playing together. So I rode off to her home, an old house set
in its walled inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me,
calling me by my name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It
was her mother. And while I stood staring at her changed face she took
me by the hand and began to whisper in my ear ... what I had to know.
Blindly, like one bludgeoned on the head, I followed her into a
darkened room, and saw what lay there with closed eyes and hair still
wet from the river into which my girl had cast herself.

No, I cannot put into words just what had happened; indeed, I never
really knew all. There was no public scandal, only great sorrow. But I
died that morning. The young and happy part of me died, and, only
half-alive I walked about among the living, dragging about with me the
corpse of what had been myself. Crushed by this horrible burden which
none saw but I, I was blind to the beauties of earth and deaf to the
mercies of heaven, until a great Voice called me to come out of the
sepulcher of myself; and I came--alive again, and free, of a strong
spirit, but with youth gone from it. Out of the void of an
irremediable disaster God had called me to His service, chastened and
humbled.

"_Who is weak and I am not weak? who is offended and I burn not?_"

And yet, although I knew my decision was irrevocable, I did not find
it easy to tell my mother. Then:

"Little mother of my heart," I blurted, "my career is decided. I have
been called. I am for the Church."

We were in her pleasant morning room, a beautiful room, and the lace
curtains were pushed aside to allow free ingress of air and sunlight.
Between the windows hung two objects my mother most greatly
cherished--one an enameled Petitot miniature, gold-framed, of a man in
the flower of his youth. His hair, beautiful as the hair of Absalom,
falls about his haughty, high-bred face, and so magnificently is he
clothed that when I was a child I used to associate him in my mind
with those "_captains and rulers, clothed most gorgeously, all of them
desirable young men, ... girdled with a girdle upon their loins,
exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look
to" ... whom Aholibah "doted upon when her eyes saw them