whom she would have recoiled with horror had she known their lives as I did. Yet I defy the boldest of them to look into her eyes and say one word which he would not have spoken before his own mother. If they visit her, they must leave their worse natures outside, like their outer coverings, and only bring their better selves into her presence. I did not find witnessing all this flattery and devotion a very cheerful occupation. If she were actually mine, if I knew my place in her heart and life to be absolutely secure and unapproachable, the social homage she wins might strike me differently; then, indeed, might "the dogs eat of the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table." But now, if we are bidden on an equality to the same board, I must decline to share the feast. I was thinking of all this, when the man to whom I was talking upon some indifferent subject, followed the direction of my eyes, and said, idly: "That Miss Glenn is very handsome, but she is awfully proud and ambitious. Money and fashion are the gods she worships; and yet I suppose some of those poor fellows imagine it possible she might marry them for love." The contrast between his words and the truth, as I knew it, concerning her, started out before me so vividly as I listened, that I turned to him, stimulated and strengthened through my whole nature. I may never win her, but there came to me a glorious, glad certainty, that, if she ever accepts me, it will be as truly for my simple manhood as when Eve gave herself to Adam.
She was seemingly in her brightest and gayest mood, and I was thinking how natural it was she should find the moments delightful, when she looked round and called me to her with a little movement of her eyes. "Isn't it time to go?" she asked. "I am so tired of all this. Suppose you find Nelly, and see if she is willing to leave." I went away on my errand, a much relieved, but much astonished man. We were delayed a moment or two on the front steps, waiting for the carriage, and I was drawing her wrappings more closely around her, to shield her from the night-air, when she said, looking back into the crowded hall, "How much pleasanter it is around John's fire than in all that noise, and light, and confusion." "John's fireside," I answered, eagerly, "has, of late, been to me the pleasantest place on earth." And, carrying the memory of her sentence with me, I went home with a far lighter, happier heart than an hour before I had imagined possible.
May 15th.—I have had no heart to keep any chronicle of the last month. Ever since that evening party there has been a gradual change in her. All the easy brightness with which she used to greet me has died out of her manner, and in its place has come constrained abruptness. She avoids me so systematically that I wonder I ever meet her. If by rare chance we are alone, she will talk in a nervous, hurried fashion, and, if any one else comes in, will turn to them with evident relief. And then I go away, too utterly wretched to do anything but torture myself with vain attempts to discover what mistake or fault of mine has produced the alteration.
And yet I have had moments of a happiness so exquisite, so transcendent, that I cannot put it into words. At single seconds, there has come into her eyes and voice a softness (if I dared I should call it a tenderness) which has stopped the very beating of my heart. Thinking of these flashes of divine light in my dark night of trouble, there sometimes comes to me a faint dream, rather than a hope, that there may be a meaning in this change other than I have put upon it. When I was almost a boy, I once spent a summer in the country with a great leader of society, a social sovereign who had practically learned human
