he touched the Doctor on the shoulder with a quick, nervous tap of
his hand,) "I shall marry her,--God bless her!"

And Reuben, by the very speech, as well as by the thoughts that had gone
before, had worked himself into a passion of devotion.

"Be careful, my son," said the old gentleman; "remember how your
enthusiasm has betrayed you in a still more serious matter."

Reuben smiled bitterly.

"Don't reproach me with that, father. It seems to me that I am acting
now more on the side of the Christian charities than either you or Aunt
Eliza."

And with this he strode out, leaving the Doctor in an agony of
apprehension.

A moment after, Miss Eliza, who was ever on the alert, and without whose
knowledge a swallow could not dart into the chimneys of the parsonage,
came rustling into the study.

"Well, Benjamin, what does Reuben say?"

"Given over to his idols, Eliza,--given over to his idols. We can only
pray God to have him in His holy keeping."

It would be impossible to fathom all the emotions of Reuben during that
interview with his father. It would be wrong to say that the view of
future marriage had not often held up its brilliant illusions before
him; it would be wrong to say that they had never been associated with
the charming vivacity of Adele, as well as, at other times, with the
sweet graces of Rose Elderkin. But these illusions had been of a
character so transitory, so fleeting, that he had come to love their
brilliant changes, and to look forward with some dread to the possible
permanence of them, or such fixedness as should take away the charming
drift of his vagaries. If, in some wanton and quite impossible moment,
the modest Rose had conquered her delicacy so far as to put her hand in
his, and say, "Will you be my husband?" he would not have been so much
outraged by her boldness as disturbed by the reflection that a pleasant
little dream of love was broken up, and that his thought must come to
that practical solution of a _yes_ or _no_ which would make an end of
his delightful doubts and yearnings. The positive and the known are,
after all, so much less, under imaginative measure, than the uncertain
and the dreamy!

And if he could have taken the spinster's old tales of Adele's regard
for him and devotion to him at their highest truth, (which he never did,
because of the girl's provoking familiarity and indifference,) he would
have felt a great charm in his life cut off. Yet now he wanders in
se