occurred to her that I was only trifling with those affections
which it seemed so ardently my intention to win. She knew that my
fortune was large enough to dispense with the necessity of fortune with
my wife, and in birth she would have equalled men of greater pretensions
to myself; added to this, long adulation had made her sensible though
not vain of her attractions, and she listened with a credulous ear to
the insinuated flatteries I was so well accustomed to instil.

Never shall I forget--no, though I double my present years--the shock,
the wildness of despair with which she first detected the selfishness
of my homage; with which she saw that I had only mocked her trusting
simplicity; and that while she had been lavishing the richest treasures
of her heart before the burning altars of Love, my idol had been Vanity
and my offerings deceit. She tore herself from the profanation of my
grasp; she shrouded herself from my presence. All interviews with me
were rejected; all my letters returned to me unopened; and though, in
the repentance of my heart, I entreated, I urged her to accept vows that
were no longer insincere, her pride became her punishment, as well as
my own. In a moment of bitter and desperate feeling; she accepted the
offers of another, and made the marriage bond a fatal and irrevocable
barrier to our reconciliation and union.

Oh, how I now cursed my infatuation! how passionately I recalled the
past! how coldly I turned from the hollow and false world, to whose
service I had sacrificed my happiness, to muse and madden over the
prospects I had destroyed and the loving and noble heart I had rejected!
Alas! after all, what is so ungrateful as that world for which we
renounce so much? Its votaries resemble the Gymnosophists of old, and
while they profess to make their chief end pleasure, we can only learn
that they expose themselves to every torture and every pain!

Lord Merton, the man whom Caroline now called husband, was among the
wealthiest and most dissipated of his order; and two years after our
separation I met once more with the victim of my unworthiness, blazing
in "the full front" of courtly splendour, the leader of its gayeties and
the cynosure of her followers. Intimate with the same society, we were
perpetually cast together, and Caroline was proud of displaying the
indifference towards me, which, if she felt not, she had at least learnt
artfully to assume. This indifference was her ruin. The de