Next to my mother, came Julia, my cousin, five years older than I, who had coldly looked down upon me, and snubbed me like a sister, as a boy; watched my progress through Elizabeth College, and through Guy’s Hospital; and perceived at last that I was a young man whom it was no disgrace to call cousin.  To crown all, she fell in love with me; so at least my mother told me, taking me into her confidence, and speaking with a depth of pleading in her sunken eyes, which were worn with much weeping.  Poor mother!  I knew very well what unspoken wish was in her heart.  Julia had grown up under her care as I had done, and she stood second to me in her affection.

It is not difficult to love any woman who has a moderate share of attractions—­at least I did not find it so then.  I was really fond of Julia, too—­very fond.  I knew her as intimately as any brother knows his sister.  She had kept up a correspondence with me all the time I was at Guy’s, and her letters had been more interesting and amusing than her conversation generally was.  Some women, most cultivated women, can write charming letters; and Julia was a highly-cultivated woman.  I came back from Guy’s with a very greatly-increased regard and admiration for my cousin Julia.

So, when my mother, with her pleading, wistful eyes, spoke day after day of Julia, of her dutiful love toward her, and her growing love for me, I drifted, almost without an effort of my own volition, into an engagement with her.  You see there was no counter-balance.  I was acquainted with every girl on the island of my own class; pretty girls were many of them, but there was after all not one that I preferred to my cousin.  My old dreams and romances about love, common to every young fellow, had all faded into a very commonplace, everyday vision of having a comfortable house of my own, and a wife as good as most other men’s wives.  Just in the same way, my ambitious plans of rising to the very top of the tree in my profession had dwindled down to satisfaction with the very limited practice of one of our island doctors.  I found myself chained to this rock in the sea; all my future life would probably be spent there; and Fate offered me Julia as the companion fittest for me.  I was contented with my fate, and laughed off my boyish fancy that I ought to be ready to barter the world for love.

Added to these two strong ties keeping me in Guernsey, there were the hundred, the thousand small associations which made that island, and my people living upon it, dearer than any other place, or any other people, in the world.  Taking the strength of the rope which held me to the pier-head as represented by one hundred, then my love for my mother would stand at sixty-six and a half, my engagement to Julia at about twenty and the remainder may go toward my old associations.  That is pretty nearly the sum of it.