He was one of those single-hearted, resolute fellows, who have the greatest faculty for persistently blundering under an honest but wrong impression. But, in this case, his impression was natural, and he was wrong, only because Lottie was "capable of noble things,"--only because she did belong to that class of women to whom the love of their heart counts for infinitely more than all externals. If he had fallen in love with a very goodish sort of girl of the Bel Parton type, the course he had marked out would have been the wisest and best, eventually, for both, even though it involved, at first, a good deal of suffering. When a wife assures her husband, by word or manner, "You took advantage of my love and inexperience to commit me to a life and condition that are distasteful or revolting, and you have thereby inflicted an irreparable injury," the man, if he be fine-fibred and sensitive, can only look forward to a painful and aggravated form of martyrdom. One had better live alone as long as Methuselah than induce a small-souled woman to enter with him on a life involving continual sacrifice. With such women, some men can be tolerably happy, if they have the means to carry out the "gilded cage" principle; but woe to them both if the gilded cage is broken or lost, and they have to go out into the great world and build their nest wherever they can. Providence had given to Lottie the chance to live the life of ideal womanhood,--the life of love and devotion,--and she did not mean to lose it. While her high spirit would often chafe with a little wholesome friction, it would yet grow sweeter and more patient under the trials of the hardest lot, if they could only be endured at his side to whom, by some mystic necessity of her being, she had given her heart. Therefore, with unmingled satisfaction she saw that she was sapping the student's stern resolution not to speak. She would, by a witchery as innocent as subtile, beguile him into just the opposite of what he had proposed. As she had declared to her uncle, he should ask her, in a very humble manner, to become a home missionary, and she, under the circumstances, was more ready to comply than to become Empress of all the Russias. But, during the remainder of the ride, she made the time pass all too quickly, as she led him to speak of his student life, his Western home, and especially of his mother; and Lottie smiled appreciatively over the enthusiasm and affection which he manifested for one concerning whom she had ever heard Mrs. Marchmont speak a little slightingly. The genuine interest which she took in all that related to Mrs. Hemstead touched the young man very closely, and his whole nature was getting under arms against what his heart was beginning to characterize as a most unnatural and stupid resolution.