“What’s to become of our Hebrew and history, if you turn poet?” inquired the old gentleman, still chuckling.

Bressant turned his head away and closed his eyes wearily.  “I don’t want any thing more to do with that,” said he.  “Love is study enough, and work enough, for a lifetime.  Mathematics, and logic, and philosophy—­all those things have nothing to do with love, and couldn’t help me in it.  It’s outside of every thing else:  it has laws of its own:  I’m just beginning to learn them.”

“A professional lover! well, as long as you recognize the sufficiency of one object in your studies, you might do worse, that’s certain.  But you can’t make a living out of it, my boy.”

“I don’t need money, I have enough; if I hadn’t, money-making is for men without hearts; but mine is bigger than my head; I must give myself up to it.”

“That won’t do,” returned the professor, shaking his head.  “Lovers must earn their bread-and-butter as well as people with brains.  Besides,” here his face and tone became serious, “there’s one thing we’ve both forgotten.  This matter of your false name—­you can’t be married as Bressant, you know:  and if the tenure of your property depends, as you said, on preserving the incognito, I have reason to believe that you stand an excellent chance of losing every cent of it, the moment the minister has pronounced your real name.”

“No matter!” said the young man, with an impatient movement, as if to dismiss an unprofitable subject.  “I shall have Sophie; my father’s will can’t deprive me of her.  I don’t want to be famous, nor to have a great reputation—­except with her.”

The old man was touched at this devotion, unreasonable and impracticable though it was.  He laid his hand kindly on the invalid’s big shoulder.

“I don’t say but that a wife’s a good exchange for the world, my boy; I’m glad you should feel it, too.  But when you marry her, you promise to support her, as long as you have strength and health to do it.  It’s a natural and necessary consequence of your love for her”—­and here the professor paused a moment to marvel at the position in which he found himself—­stating the first axioms of life to such a man as this pupil of his; “and you should be unwilling to take her, as I certainly should be to give her, on any other terms.  If your hands are empty, you must at any rate be able to show that they won’t always continue so.”

“Well, but I don’t want to think about that just now; I can be a farmer, or a clerk; I can make a living with my body, if I can’t with my mind; and I can write to Mrs. Vanderplanck, some time, and find out just how things are.”

“Very well—­very well! or perhaps I’d better write to her myself—­well—­and as long as you are on your back, there’ll be no use in troubling you with business—­that’s certain!  And perhaps things may turn out better than they look, in the end.”

As Professor Valeyon pronounced this latter sentence, he smiled to himself pleasantly and mysteriously.  He seemed to fancy he had stronger grounds for believing in a happy issue, than, for some reason, he was at liberty to disclose.  And the smile lingered about the corners of his mouth and eyes, as if the issue in question were to be of that peculiarly harmonious kind usually supposed to be reserved for the themes of poems, or the conclusions of novels.