"I have never sought admiration or love," said I, every feeling of delicacy and pride rising to repel an insinuation so unjust. "When they have been mine, they were spontaneous gifts, offered nobly, and if not accepted, at least declined with gratitude and sensibility. If I have been so unfortunate as to win what your lovely sister might more justly claim, it has been by the exercise of no base allurement or meritricious attractions. I appeal to your own experience, and if it does not acquit me, I am for ever silent." Coldly and proudly my eye met his, as we stood face to face in the light of the midnight moon. I, who had looked up to him with the reverence due to a superior being, felt that I was above him now. He was the slave of an unjust passion, the dupe of a distempered fancy, and as such unworthy of my respect and love. As I admitted this truth, I shuddered with that vague horror we feel in dreams, when we recoil from the brink of something, we know not what. I trembled when his lips opened, fearful he would say something more irrational and unmanly still. "O Ernest!" I cried, all at once yielding to the emotions that were bearing me down with such irresistible power, "you frighten me, you fill me with unspeakable dread. There seems a deep abyss yawning between us, and I stand upon one icy brink and you on the other, and the chasm widens, and I stretch out my arms in vain to reach you, and I call, and nothing but a dreary echo answers, and I look into my heart and do not find you there. Save me, Ernest, save me,--my husband, save yourself from a doom so dreadful!" Excited by the awful picture of desolation I had drawn, I slid down upon my knees and raised my clasped hands, as if pleading for life beneath the axe of the executioner. I must have been the very personification of despair, with my hair wildly sweeping round me, and hands locked in agony. "To live on, live on together, year after year, cold and estranged, without love, without hope,"--I continued, unable to check the words that came now as in a rushing tide,--"Oh! is it not dreadful, Ernest, even to think of? There is no evil I could not bear while we loved one another. If poverty came,--welcome, welcome. I could toil and smile, if I only toiled for you, if I were only _trusted_, only _believed_. There is no sacrifice I would not make to prove my faith. Do you demand my right hand?--cut it off; my right eye?--pluck it out;--I withhold nothing. I would even lay my heart bleeding at your feet in attestation of my truth. But what can I do, when the idle breath of others, over which I have no power, shakes the tottering fabric of your confidence, and I am buried beneath the ruins?"