I laughed aloud:  he looked at me then in surprise.  “I laugh,” said I, “because I see how absurd it was to fancy that you loved me.  A bridge between us!  If you loved me as I love you, our love would turn water into land, melt mountains into plains:  we would cross dry-shod to one another.”

“Do you love me so?” he said, his blue eyes gleaming, and making a step toward me.  I had power enough to make him feel, and feel strongly, but that was not enough.

“No,” I said, “Mr. Lawrence, you must take nothing from me now:  I can give nothing now.”

“But if I want all?” he said.

I laughed again.  “But you do not,” I said.  “I have told you I love you and would marry you.  You cannot, you say.  Then that ends all between us.  I love you too much to be able to give you only what you give me.”

“We cannot marry,” he repeated:  “it would be ruin to both of us.”

“Go away!” I said:  “I would rather be alone.”  I was spent, and felt feeble and weak.

“Let me tell you, first, that I admire you, esteem you, infinitely:  let me say this before I go; and you will think of me kindly.”  He said this pleadingly.

I looked at him wonderingly.  Did he not yet know how much I loved him?  My courage and pride were ebbing fast away.  Faintly I said, “Before you go kneel down in front of me, and let me touch your forehead with my lips.”  He did so, and I bent forward and took his head in both my hands and kissed it.  Somehow as I did it the strange thought came to me that if I had ever had a son, just so I have kissed his head.  It was a yearning feeling, with such tenderness in it that my heart seemed dissolving.  Many times.  I kissed it and held it, and then, “Good-bye, my only love,” I said.  “I could have loved you very well.”

His eyes were wet with tears as he raised his head.  “I shall never forget you:  you are nobleness itself,” he said.  “God bless and prosper you, Miss Linton!” Then he went.

That is all, all, and life is where it was a month ago; only, “I wear my rue with a difference.”  He was my inferior.  I was higher and nobler and purer than he, but I loved him, and the greatest joy I could know would have been to lead my life with him.  So it is over, and this book had best be put away.  I will go back to my old life, and see what I can make of it.  I am glad to have known what love meant:  I shall be gladder after a while, when this ache is over.  If he could but have loved me as I loved him—­if he could!  But he could not, and it was not to be.  I must learn to be again a strong-minded woman.

Letter from Henry Lawrence to George Manning.

DEAR GEORGE:  I’m off for Europe to-morrow.  I behaved like a man and broke the whole thing off.  She behaved like a man too, told me how much she loved me, and then accepted the position.  I feel like a girl who has jilted a fellow, and it’s a very poor way to feel.  Never flirt with a strong-minded woman.  I believe she cared for me, and I think very likely when I’m fifty I shall think I was a fool not to have braved it out and married her.  I’m sure if I don’t think it then, I shall when I reach the next world; but then, like the girl in Browning’s poem, “she will pass, nor turn her face.”