gement was not to be announced in form till the next week;
though I, as the common friend of both parties, had been made an
exceptional confidante; and Jim, afraid of betraying himself, had not
trusted himself to take leave of his aunt, but left his love for her,
and his apologies for outstaying his time so far in the meadow as to
leave himself none for the farm-house.

Thus I had a reprieve. When towards midnight my head grew easier, I was
worn out and slept; so that it was not till the birds began to rehearse
for their concert at sunrise the next morning, that I came to myself and
looked things in the face in the clear light of the awful dawn.

If you can imagine a very heavy weight let somewhat gradually, but
irresistibly, down upon young and tender shoulders, then gently lifted
again, little by little, by a sympathizing and unlooked-for helper, and
lastly tossed by him unexpectedly into the air, only to fall back with
redoubled weight, and crush the frame that was but bowed before, you can
form some idea of what had just happened to me. My mother's death, our
embarrassments, my loneliness, the hard and to me uncongenial work I had
to do, all came upon me together more heavily than at any time since the
first fortnight that I spent at Greenville.

But that was not all. Disappointment is hardly the right word to use;
for I can truly say that I never made any calculations for the future
upon Jim's attentions to me. They were offered so honestly and
respectfully that I instinctively felt I could accept them with perfect
propriety, and perhaps could scarcely with propriety refuse. I had never
once asked myself what they meant, nor whither they tended. But yet I
was used to them now, and had learned to prize them far more than I
knew; and they must be given up. My heart-strings had unconsciously
grown to him, and ought to be torn away. And I think that, beyond grief,
beyond the prospect of lonely toil and poverty henceforth, beyond all
the rest, was the horror of an idea which came upon me, that I had lost
the control of my own mind,--that my peace had passed out of my keeping
into the power of another, who, though friendly to me, neither would nor
could preserve it for me,--that I was doomed to be henceforward the prey
of feelings which I must try to conceal, and perhaps could not for any
length of time, which lowered me in my own eyes, and would do so in
those of others if they were seen by them, which were wrong, and