"Think of yourself ten years hence--a king among men, with the world at your feet, and at those of the glorious woman who will have smoothed your path to greatness and fame and power! Mistress and wife--goddess and queen in one! "Think of the poor struggling painter, painting his poor little pictures in his obscure corner to feed half a dozen hungry children and the anxious, careworn wife, whose beauty has long faded away in the petty, sordid, hopeless domestic struggle, just as her husband's little talent has long been wasted and used up in wretched pot-boilers for mere bread; think of poverty, debt, and degradation, and all the miserable ugliness of life--the truest, tritest, and oldest story in the world! Love soon flies out of the window when these wolves snarl at the door. "Think of all this, Barty, and think of the despair you are bringing on one lost lonely soul who loves you as a mother loves her first-born, and has founded such hopes on you; dismiss this pretty little middle-class puritan from your thoughts and go back to Julia. "I will not hurry your decision; I will come back in exactly a week from to-night. I am at your mercy. "Martia." This letter made Barty very unhappy. It was a strange dilemma. What is it that now and again makes a woman in a single moment take such a powerful grip of a man's fancy that he can never shake himself free again, and never wants to? Tunes can be like that, sometimes. Not the pretty little tinkling tunes that please everybody at once; the pleasure of them can fade in a year, a month--even a week, a day! But those from a great mint, and whose charm will last a man his lifetime! Many years ago a great pianist, to amuse some friends (of whom I was one), played a series of waltzes by Schubert which I had never heard before--the "Soirées de Vienne," I think they were called. They were lovely from beginning to end; but one short measure in particular was full of such extraordinary enchantment for me that it has really haunted me through life. It is as if it were made on purpose for me alone, a little intimate aside à mon intention--the gainliest, happiest thought I had ever heard expressed in music. For nobody else seemed to think those particular bars were more beautiful than all the rest; but, oh! the difference to me! And said I to myself: "That's Leah; and all the rest is some heavenly garden of roses she's walking in!" Tempo di valsa: _Rum_--tiddle-iddle _um_ tum tum, _Tid_dle-tiddle-iddle-iddle _um_ tum, tum _Tum_ tiddle iddle-iddle _um_ tum, tum _Tid_dle-iddle, iddle-_hay!_ ... etc., etc.