“You love me, you know you love me; and you madden yourself by refusing to confess it!” He felt her heart throb as he spoke, and knew that he spoke truth.  “What gulfs are these you dream of?  No; I will not ask.  There is no gulf between me and one whom I adore, who has thrown a spell over me which I cannot resist, which I glory in not resisting; for you have been my guide, my morning star, which has awakened me to new life.  If I have a noble purpose upon earth, if I have roused myself from that conceited dream of self-culture which now looks to me so cold, and barren, and tawdry, into the hope of becoming useful, beneficent—­to whom do I owe it but to you, Marie?  No; there is no gulf, Marie!  You are my wife, and you alone!” And he held her so firmly, and gazed down upon her with such strong manhood, that her woman’s heart quailed; and he might, perhaps, have conquered then and there, had not Sabina, summoned by her shriek, entered hastily.

“Good heavens! what is the matter?”

“Wait but one minute, Mrs. Mellot,” said he; “the next, I shall introduce you to my bride.”

“Never! never! never!” cried she, and breaking from him, flew into Sabina’s arms.  “Leave me, leave me to bear my curse alone!”

And she broke out into such wild weeping, and refused so wildly to hear another word from Stangrave, that he went away in despair, the prize snatched from his grasp in the very moment of seeming victory.

He went in search of Claude, who had agreed to meet him at the Exhibition in Trafalgar Square.  Thither Stangrave rolled away in his cab, his heart full of many thoughts.  Marie’s words about him, though harsh and exaggerated, were on the whole true.  She had fascinated him utterly.  To marry her was now the one object of his life:  she had awakened in him, as he had confessed, noble desires to be useful:  but the discovery that he was to be useful to the negro, that abolition was the Sangreal in the quest of which he was to go forth, was as disagreeable a discovery as he could well have made.

From public life in any shape, with all its vulgar noise, its petty chicanery, its pandering to the mob whom he despised, he had always shrunk, as so many Americans of his stamp have done.  He had no wish to struggle, unrewarded and disappointed, in the ranks of the minority; while to gain place and power on the side of the majority was to lend himself to that fatal policy which, ever since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, has been gradually making the northern states more and more the tools of the southern ones.  He had no wish to be threatened in Congress with having his Northerner’s “ears nailed to the counter, like his own base coin,” or to be informed that he, with the 17,000,000 of the north, were the “White Slaves” of a southern aristocracy of 350,000 slaveholders.  He had enough comprehension of, enough admiration for the noble principles of the American Constitution to see that the democratic mobs of Irish