earth give you back such love as you lost in mine." "I know it, I know it--fool that I was--miserable fool!" "Ay, but comfort yourself--wilder and sadder folly in myself! Your mother was right. 'The vain child,' she said, 'knows not her own heart. She is new to the world--has seen none of her own years. For your sake, as for hers, I must insist on the experiment of absence. A year's ordeal--see if she is then of the same mind.' I marvelled at her coldness; proudly I submitted to her seasonings; fearlessly I confided the result to you. Ah! how radiant was your smile, when, in the parting hour, I said, 'Summer and you will return again!' In vain, on pretence that the experiment should be complete, did your mother carry you abroad, and exact from us both the solemn promise that not even a letter should pass beween us--that our troth, made thus conditional, should be a secret to all--in vain, if meant to torture me with doubt. In my creed, a doubt is itself a treason. How lovely grew the stern face of Ambition!--how Fame seemed as a messenger from me to you! In the sound of applause I said 'They cannot shut out the air that will carry that sound to her ears! All that I can win from honour shall be my marriage gifts to my queenly bride.' See that arrested pile--begun at my son's birth, stopped awhile at his death, recommenced on a statelier plan when I thought of your footstep on its floors--your shadow on its walls. Stopped now forever! Architects can build a palace; can they build a home? But you --you--you, all the while--your smile on another's suit--your thoughts on another's hearth!" "Not so!--not so! Your image never forsook me. I was giddy, thoughtless, dazzled, entangled; and I told you in the letter you returned to me--told you that I had been deceived!"