But perhaps you have changed your opinion--Do you still think as you did?--Are you still _certain that I act from mistaken principles?_ [He instantly understood me--Had you seen his look, Louisa--!] I am, madam. And _shall persist to the end of time?_ To the end of time. I could not bear it, Louisa. I burst away. What rash impulse was it that hurried me forward to tempt this trial?--Alas! It was the vain hope, for vain it appears to be, he might have retracted. My heart is too full to proceed--Heaven bless you!--Heaven bless you, my dear friend!--You see how weak I am. A. W. ST. IVES LETTER LXXIII _Frank Henley to Oliver Trenchard_ _London, Grosvenor Street_ Oliver, I must fly!--There is neither peace nor safety for me if I remain--Resolution begins to faint under these repeated and oppressive struggles--Life is useless, virtue inefficient, time murdered, and I must fly!--Here I can do nothing but doubt, hope, despair, and linger in uncertainty: my body listless, my mind incoherent, my days wasted in vain reveries on absurd possibilities, and my nights haunted by the confused phantoms of a disturbed and sickly brain!--I must fly! But whither?--I know not!--If I mean to be truly master of my affections, seas must separate us! Impossibility must be made more impossible!--'Tis that, Oliver, which kills me, that ignis fatuus of false hope--Were she even married, if her husband were not immortal, I feel as if my heart would still dwell and feed on the meagre May-be! It refuses to renounce her, and makes a thousand and a thousand efforts to oblige me again to urge its just claims. I am in the labyrinth of contradictions, and know not how to get out. My own feelings, my remarks on hers, the looks, actions and discourse of this dangerous lover are all embroiled, all incongruous, all illusory. I seem to tempt her to evil by my stay, him I offend, and myself I torment--I must therefore begone! Oliver, our hearts are united!--Truth and principle have made them one, and prejudice and pride have not the power to dissever them!--She herself feels this intimately, yet persists in her mistake. I think, Oliver, it is not what the world or what she understands by love which occasions this anarchy of mind. I think I could command and reprove my passions into silence. Either I mistake myself, or even now, situated as I am, I could rejoice were there a certainty, nay were there but strong probabilities, that her favourite purpose on Clifton should be effected. But the more I meditate, and my hours, days, and weeks pass away and are lost in meditation on this subject, the more does my mind persist in its doubts, and my heart in its claims. Surely, Oliver, she is under a double mistake! Surely her reasonings both on him and me are erroneous.