“Are we but automata, worked by springs, moved by the stronger impulse, and unable to choose for ourselves which impulse that shall be?  Even now, in decreeing my own destruction, do I exercise free-will, or am I the sport of hereditary tendencies, of mistaken views of honour, of a seeming self-sacrifice, which, perhaps, is but selfishness in disguise?  I blight my unfortunate father’s old age; I destroy the last of an ancient house; but I remove from the path of Olive Dunne the shadow that must rest upon the sunshine of what will eventually, I trust, be a happy life, unvexed by memories of one who loved her passionately.  Dear Olive! how pure, how ardent was my devotion to her none knows better than you.  But Olive had, I will not say a fault, though I suffer from it, but a quality, or rather two qualities, which have completed my misery.  Lightly as she floats on the stream of society, the most casual observer, and even the enamoured beholder, can see that Olive Dunne has great pride, and no sense of humour.  Her dignity is her idol.  What makes her, even for a moment, the possible theme of ridicule is in her eyes an unpardonable sin.  This sin, I must with penitence confess, I did indeed commit.  Another woman might have forgiven me.  I know not how that may be; I throw myself on the mercy of the court.  But, if another could pity and pardon, to Olive this was impossible.  I have never seen her since that fatal moment when, paler than her orange blossoms, she swept through the porch of the church, while I, dishevelled, mud-stained, half-drowned—­ah! that memory will torture me if memory at all remains.  And yet, fool, maniac, that I was, I could not resist the wild, mad impulse to laugh which shook the rustic spectators, and which in my case was due, I trust, to hysterical but not unmanly emotion.  If any woman, any bride, could forgive such an apparent but most unintentional insult, Olive Dunne, I knew, was not that woman.  My abject letters of explanation, my appeals for mercy, were returned unopened.  Her parents pitied me, perhaps had reasons for being on my side, but Olive was of marble.  It is not only myself that she cannot pardon, she will never, I know, forgive herself while my existence reminds her of what she had to endure.  When she receives the intelligence of my demise, no suspicion will occur to her; she will not say ‘He is fitly punished;’ but her peace of mind will gradually return.

“It is for this, mainly, that I sacrifice myself, but also because I cannot endure the dishonour of a laggard in love and a recreant bridegroom.

“So much for my motives:  now to my tale.

“The day before our wedding-day had been the happiest in my life.  Never had I felt so certain of Olive’s affections, never so fortunate in my own.  We parted in the soft moonlight; she, no doubt, to finish her nuptial preparations; I, to seek my couch in the little rural inn above the roaring waters of the Budon. {3}