an
had ever before stood between me and my ambitions, my occupations, my
amusements. No woman had ever before inspired me with the sensations
which I now felt.

In trying to realise my position, there was this one question to
consider; was I still strong enough to resist the temptation which
accident had thrown in my way? I had this one incentive to resistance:
the conviction that, if I succumbed, as far as my family prospects were
concerned, I should be a ruined man.

I knew my father's character well: I knew how far his affections and
his sympathies might prevail over his prejudices--even over his
principles--in some peculiar cases; and this very knowledge convinced
me that the consequences of a degrading marriage contracted by his son
(degrading in regard to rank), would be terrible: fatal to one, perhaps
to both. Every other irregularity--every other offence even--he
might sooner or later forgive. _This_ irregularity, _this_ offence,
never--never, though his heart broke in the struggle. I was as sure of
it, as I was of my own existence at that moment.

I loved her! All that I felt, all that I knew, was summed up in those
few words! Deteriorating as my passion was in its effect on the
exercise of my mental powers, and on my candour and sense of duty in
my intercourse with home, it was a pure feeling towards _her._ This is
truth. If I lay on my death-bed, at the present moment, and knew that,
at the Judgment Day, I should be tried by the truth or falsehood of the
lines just written, I could say with my last breath: So be it; let them
remain.

But what mattered my love for her? However worthy of it she might be, I
had misplaced it, because chance--the same chance which might have
given her station and family--had placed her in a rank of life far--too
far--below mine. As the daughter of a "gentleman," my father's welcome,
my father's affection, would have been bestowed on her, when I took her
home as my wife. As the daughter of a tradesman, my father's anger, my
father's misery, my own ruin perhaps besides, would be the fatal dower
that a marriage would confer on her. What made all this difference? A
social prejudice. Yes: but a prejudice which had been a principle--nay,
more, a religion--in our house, since my birth; and for centuries before
it.

(How strange that foresight of love which precipitates the future into
the present! Here was I thinking of her as my wife, before, perhaps, she
had a suspicion of the p