"What Idol has displaced you?" he rejoined.
"A golden one."
"This is the even-handed dealing of the world!"
he said. "There is nothing on which it is so hard as
poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of
wealth!"
"You fear the world too much," she answered,
gently. "All your other hopes have merged into the
hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid
reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off
one by one, until the master-passion, Gain,
engrosses you. Have I not?"
"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown
so much wiser, what then? I am not changed
towards you."
She shook her head.
"Am I?"
"Our contract is an old one. It was made when
we were both poor and content to be so, until, in
good season, we could improve our worldly fortune
by our patient industry. You are changed. When it
was made, you were another man."
"I was a boy," he said impatiently.
"Your own feeling tells you that you were not
what you are," she returned. "I am. That which
promised happiness when we were one in heart, is
fraught with misery now that we are two. How often
and how keenly I have thought of this, I will not
say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can
release you."
"Have I ever sought release?"
"In words. No. Never."
"In what, then?"
"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in
another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its
great end. In everything that made my love of any
worth or value in your sight. If this had never been
between us," said the girl, looking mildly, but with
steadiness, upon him; "tell me, would you seek me
out and try to win me now? Ah, no!"
He seemed to yield to the justice of this
supposition, in spite of himself. But he said with a
struggle, "You think not."
He was about to speak; but with her head turned
from him, she resumed.
"You may -- the memory of what is past half
makes me hope you will -- have pain in this. A very,
very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection
of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it
happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in
the life you have chosen!"
She left him, and they parted.