I promised solemnly and have always kept my word, as this true, gracious woman, so full of faults and beauties, virtues and failings, has, ever since that day and moment, kept hers.  It seemed that my love, or what I supposed was love, left my heart at once, frozen in the cold glint of her eyes as she smiled upon my first avowal; somewhat as disease may leave the sickened body upon a great shock.  And in its place came the restful flame of a friend’s love, which so softly warms without burning.  But the burning!  There is nothing in life worth having compared with it for all its pains and agonies.  Is there?

“Now if you must love somebody,” continued the princess, “there is Lady Jane Bolingbroke, who is beautiful and good, and admires you, and, I think, could learn to——­” but here the lady in question ran out from behind the draperies, where, I believe, she had been listening to it all, and put her hand over her mistress’ mouth to silence her.

“Don’t believe one word she says, Sir Edwin,” cried Lady Jane; “if you do I never will like you.”  The emphasis on the “will” held out such involuntary promise in case I did not believe the princess, that I at once protested total want of faith in a single syllable she had said about her, and vowed that I knew it could not be true; that I dared not hope for such happiness.

You see, I had begun to make love to Jane almost before I was off my knees to Mary, and, therefore, I had not been much hurt in Mary’s case.  I had suffered merely a touch of the general epidemic, not the lingering, chronic disease that kills.

Then I knew that the best cure for the sting which lies in a luckless love is to love elsewhere, and Jane, as she stood there, so petite, so blushing and so fair, struck me as quite the most pleasing antidote I could possibly find, so I began at once to administer to myself the delightful counter-irritant.  It was a happy thought for me; one of those which come to a man now and then, and for which he thanks his wits in every hour of his after life.

But the winning of Jane was not so easy a matter as my vanity had prompted me to think.  I started with a handicap, since Jane had heard my declaration to Mary, and I had to undo all that before I could do anything else.  Try the same thing yourself with a spirited girl, naturally laughter-loving and coy, if you think it a simple, easy undertaking.  I began to fear I should need another antidote long before I heard her sweet soul-satisfying “yes.”  I do not believe, however, I could have found in the whole world an antidote to my love for Jane.  You see I tell you frankly that I won her, and conceal nothing, so far as Jane and I are concerned, for the purpose of holding you in suspense.  I have started out to tell you the history of two other persons—­if I can ever come to it—­but find a continual tendency on the part of my own story to intrude, for every man is a very important personage to himself.  I shall, however, try to keep it out.