“Don’t imagine such hard things.  Fancy me yielding and melting, as I am doing:  human love rising like a freshly opened fountain in my mind and overflowing with sweet inundation all the field I have so carefully and with such labour prepared —­ so assiduously sown with the seeds of good intentions, of self-denying plans.  And now it is deluged with a nectarous flood —­ the young germs swamped —­ delicious poison cankering them:  now I see myself stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room at Vale Hall at my bride Rosamond Oliver’s feet:  she is talking to me with her sweet voice —­ gazing down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has copied so well —­ smiling at me with these coral lips.  She is mine —­ I am hers —­ this present life and passing world suffice to me.  Hush! say nothing —­ my heart is full of delight —­ my senses are entranced —­ let the time I marked pass in peace.”

I humoured him:  the watch ticked on:  he breathed fast and low:  I stood silent.  Amidst this hush the quartet sped; he replaced the watch, laid the picture down, rose, and stood on the hearth.

“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.”