Captain Carey regarded me pitifully, and said, “Come, come, Martin, my boy!” several times.

Johanna made no remark; but her quiet, searching eyes looked me through and through, till I almost longed for the time when she would begin to question and cross-question me.  After she was gone, Captain Carey gave me two or three glasses of his choicest wine, to cheer me up, as he said; but we were not long before we followed his sister.

“Johanna,” said Captain Carey, “we have something to tell you.”

“Come and sit here by me,” she said, making room for me beside her on her sofa; for long experience had taught her how much more difficult it is to make a confession face to face with one’s confessor, under the fire of his eyes, as it were, than when one is partially concealed from him.

“Well,” she said, in her calm, inviting voice.

“Johanna,” I replied, “I am in a terrible fix!”

“Awful!” cried Captain Carey, sympathetically; but a glance from his sister put him to silence.

“What is it, my dear Martin?” asked her inviting voice again.

“I will tell you frankly,” I said, feeling I must have it out at once, like an aching tooth.  “I love, with all my heart and soul, that girl in Sark; the one who has been my patient there.”

“Martin!” she cried, in a tone full of surprise and agitation—­“Martin!”

“Yes; I know all you would urge—­my honor; my affection for Julia; the claims she has upon me, the strongest claims possible; how good and worthy she is; what an impossibility it is even to look back now.  I know it all, and feel how miserably binding it is upon me.  Yet I love Olivia; and I shall never love Julia.”

“Martin!” she cried again.

“Listen to me, Johanna,” I said, for now the ice was broken, my frozen words were flowing as rapidly as a runnel of water; “I used to dream of a feeling something like this years ago, but no girl I saw could kindle it into reality.  I have always esteemed Julia, and when my youth was over, and I had never felt any devouring passion, I began to think love was more of a word than a fact, or to believe that it had become only a word in these cold late times.  At any rate, I concluded I was past the age for falling in love.  There was my cousin Julia certainly dearer to me than any other woman, except my mother.  I knew all her little ways; and they were not annoying to me, or were so in a very small degree.  Besides, my father had had a grand passion for my mother, and what had that come to?  There would be no such white ashes of a spent fire for Julia to shiver over.  That was how I argued the matter out with myself.  At eight-and-twenty I had never lost a quarter of an hour’s sleep, or missed a meal, for the sake of any girl.  Surely I was safe.  It was quite fair for me to propose to Julia, and she would be satisfied with the affection I could offer her.  Then there was my mother; it was the greatest happiness I could give her, and her life has not been a happy one, God knows.  So I proposed to Julia, and she accepted me last Christmas.”