be doomed to it for life is
appalling to me. The sordid cares of narrow means are so distasteful,
that I cannot contemplate them with any degree of patience. After a day
of exhausting mental effort, to return to a dingy, ill-furnished
home,--to relieve professional labors by calculations about the
gas-bill or the butcher's account,--I shrink from such a miserable
prospect! I love the elegant, the high-bred, the tasteful, in women; I
am afraid even my love for you would alter, Juanita, to see you day by
day in coarse or shabby clothing, performing such offices as are only
suited to servants,--whom we could not afford to keep.

"I have thought of it a great deal, and it seems to me that it is
useless and hopeless, that it would be the wildest folly, to continue
our engagement. With our tastes and habits, we must seek in marriage
the means of comfort, the appliances of luxury. Others may find in it
the bewildering bliss we might have known, had fortune been favorable
to us; but, as it is, I think the best, the wisest, the happiest thing
we can do is--to part!"

Oh, Heaven! this from him!

"Still, Juanita, if you think otherwise," he went on after a moment's
pause,--"if you prefer to hold me to our engagement, I am ready to
fulfil it when you wish."

It was like a man to say this, and then to feel that he had acted
uprightly and honorably!

I said nothing for a time; I could not speak. All hell woke in my
heart. I knew then what lost spirits might feel,--grief, and wounded
pride, and rage, hatred, despair! In the midst of all I made a vow; and
I kept it well!

How I had loved this man!--with what a self-forgetting, adoring love!
He had been my thought, day and night. I would have done
anything,--sacrificed, suffered anything,--yes, sinned even,--to please
his lightest fancy. And he cast me coldly off because I had no
fortune!--trampled my heart into the dust because I was poor!

"You make no answer, Juanita," he said, at length.

"I am thinking," I replied, looking up and laughing slightly, "how to
say that I quite agree with you, and have been planning all day how I
should manage to tell you the very same thing."

Miserable falsehood! But I spoke it so coolly, that he was thoroughly
deceived. He never suspected the truth,--my deep love, my outraged
pride.

"It is just as you have said, William. We have elegant tastes, and no
means of gratifying them. What should we do together? Only make each
other miserable