“You have been reared in the enjoyment of every luxury which wealth can command.  How could you bear to suffer privations, to perform menial labors, to be stinted in dress, deprived of congenial society, obliged to refrain from every amusement, because you were unable to afford the expense?  How should you like to have a grinding economy continually pressing upon you, in every arrangement of your household, every detail of your daily life? to have your best days pass in petty cares and sayings, all your intellect expended in the effort to make your paltry means do the greatest possible service?”

It was not a pleasant picture, but, harshly drawn as it was, I felt in the fulness of my love that I could do all that, and more, for him.  Oh, yes! for him and with him I would have accepted any servitude, any suffering.  Yet a secret something withheld me from saying so; and how glad I soon was that I had kept silence!

“You make no reply, Juanita,” he said.  “Well, I might put on a pretence of disinterestedness, and say that I was unwilling to bind you to such a fate, and therefore released you from your engagement.  It would not be altogether a pretence, for nothing could be more painful to me than to see the brightness of your youth fading away in the life I have described.  But I think of myself, too; comforts, luxuries, indulgences, I value highly.  Since my father’s death I have tasted enough of poverty to know something of its bitterness; and to 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!