“She was a castle-builder--yes, now you know, my dear, why I spoke so strongly, and, as you thought, so severely this morning. My mother was a castle-builder of the ordinary sort: a worldly plan of a castle was hers, and little care had she about the knight within; yet she had sufficient tact to know that it must be the idea of the _preux chevalier_ that would lure her daughter into the castle. Prudent for herself, imprudent for me, and yet she loved me--all she did was for love of me. She managed with so much address, that I had no suspicion of my being the subject of any speculation--otherwise, probably, my imagination might have revolted, my self-will have struggled, my pride have interfered, or my delicacy might have been alarmed, but nothing of all that happened; I was only too ready, too glad to believe all that I was told, all that appeared in that spring-time of hope and love. I was very romantic, not in the modern fashionable young-lady sense of the word, with the mixed ideas of a shepherdess’s hat and the paraphernalia of a peeress--love in a cottage, and a fashionable house in town. No; mine was honest, pure, real romantic love--absurd if you will; it was love nursed by imagination more than by hope. I had early, in my secret soul, as perhaps you have at this instant in yours, a pattern of perfection--something chivalrous, noble, something that is no longer to be seen now-a-days--the more delightful to imagine, the moral sublime and beautiful; more than human, yet with the extreme of human tenderness. Mine was to be a demigod whom I could worship, a husband to whom I could always look up, with whom I could always sympathise, and to whom I could devote myself with all a woman’s self-devotion. I had then a vast idea--as I think you have now, Helen--of self-devotion; you would devote yourself to your friends, but I could not shape any of my friends into a fit object. So after my own imagination I made one, dwelt upon it, doated on it, and at last threw this bright image of my own fancy full upon the being to whom I thought I was most happily destined--destined by duty, chosen by affection. The words ‘I love you’ once pronounced, I gave my whole heart in return, gave it, sanctified, as I felt, by religion. I had high religious sentiments; a vow once passed the lips, a look, a single look of appeal to Heaven, was as much for me as if pronounced at the altar, and before thousands to witness. Some time was to elapse before the celebration of our marriage. Protracted engagements are unwise, yet I should not say so; this gave me time to open my eyes--my bewitched eyes: still, some months I passed in a trance of beatification, with visions of duties all performed--benevolence universal, and gratitude, and high success, and crowns of laurel, for my hero, for he was military; it all joined well in my fancy. All the pictured tales of vast heroic deeds were to be his. Living, I was to live in the radiance of his honour; or dying, to die