"Now," said he, "that little space was given to delirium and

delusion. I rested my temples on the breast of temptation, and put

my neck voluntarily under her yoke of flowers. I tasted her cup.

The pillow was burning: there is an asp in the garland: the wine

has a bitter taste: her promises are hollow--her offers false: I

see and know all this."

I gazed at him in wonder.

"It is strange," pursued he, "that while I love Rosamond Oliver so

wildly--with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the

object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating--I

experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she

would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to

me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and

that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret.

This I know."

"Strange indeed!" I could not help ejaculating.

"While something in me," he went on, "is acutely sensible to her

charms, something else is as deeply impressed with her defects:

they are such that she could sympathise in nothing I aspired to--co-

operate in nothing I undertook. Rosamond a sufferer, a labourer, a

female apostle? Rosamond a missionary's wife? No!"

"But you need not be a missionary. You might relinquish that

scheme."

"Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid

on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the

band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering

their race--of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance--of

substituting peace for war--freedom for bondage--religion for

superstition--the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I

relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is

what I have to look forward to, and to live for."

After a considerable pause, I said--"And Miss Oliver? Are her

disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?"

"Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers: in less

than a month, my image will be effaced from her heart. She will

forget me; and will marry, probably, some one who will make her far

happier than I should do."

"You speak coolly enough; but you suffer in the conflict. You are

wasting away."

"No. If I get a little thin, it is with anxiety about my prospects,

yet unsettled--my departure, continually procrastinated. Only this

morning, I received intelligence that the successor, whose arrival I

have been so long expecting, cannot be ready to replace me for three

months to come yet; and perhaps the three months may extend to six."




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