before I take a step that some have not considered more than commonly serious,” came toward the conclusion; and the idea was toyed with till he signed his name.  “A plunge into the deep is of little moment to one who has been stripped of all clothing.  Is he not a wretch who stands and shivers still?” This letter, ending with a short and not imperious, or even urgent, request for an interview, on the morrow by the ‘fruitless tree,’ he sealed for delivery into Cornelia’s hands some hours before the time appointed.  He then wrote a clear business letter to his lawyer, and one of studied ambiguity to a cousin on his mother’s side.  His father’s brother, Percival Barrett, to whom the estates had gone, had offered him an annuity of five hundred pounds:  “though he had, as his nephew was aware, a large family.”  Sir Purcell had replied:  “Let me be the first to consider your family,” rejecting the benevolence.  He now addressed his cousin, saying:  “What would you think of one who accepts such a gift?—­of me, were you to hear that I had bowed my head and extended my hand?  Think this, if ever you hear of it:  that I have acceded for the sake of winning the highest prize humanity can bestow:  that I certainly would not have done it for aught less than the highest.”  After that he went to his narrow bed.  His determination was to write to his uncle, swallowing bitter pride, and to live a pensioner, if only Cornelia came to her tryst, “the last he would ask of her,” as he told her.  Once face to face with his beloved, he had no doubt of his power; and this feeling which he knew her to share, made her reluctance to meet him more darkly suspicious.

As he lay in the little black room, he thought of how she would look when a bride, and of the peerless beauty towering over any shades of earthliness which she would present.  His heated fancy conjured up every device and charm of sacredness and adoring rapture about that white veiled shape, until her march to the altar assumed the character of a religious procession—­a sight to awe mankind!  And where, when she stood before the minister in her saintly humility, grave and white, and tall—­where was the man whose heart was now racing for that goal at her right hand?  He felt at the troubled heart and touched two fingers on the rib, mock-quietingly, and smiled.  Then with great deliberation he rose, lit a candle, unlocked a case of pocket-pistols, and loaded them:  but a second idea coming into his head, he drew the bullet out of one, and lay down again with a luxurious speculation on the choice any hand might possibly make of the life-sparing or death-giving of those two weapons.  In his neat half-slumber he was twice startled by a report of fire-arms in a church, when a crowd of veiled women and masked men rushed to the opening, and a woman throwing up the veil from her face knelt to a corpse that she lifted without effort, and weeping, laid it in a grave, where it rested and was at peace, though multitudes hurried over it, and new stars came and went, and the winds were strange with new tongues.  The sleeper saw the morning upon that corpse when light struck his eyelids, and he awoke like a man who knew no care.