She is not
dead, but has been worse than dead for me these ten years. I am optimist
enough to believe that her old love for me still survives, making sweet
the secret places of her soul. Never once in all these years to have
doubted her love has been more than most marriages; but were I to live
for another ten years, and still another, I would believe in it still.
But the stars were against us. We met too late. We met when she had long
been engaged to a friend of her youth, a man noble and true, to whom she
owed much, and whom she felt it a kind of murder to desert. It was one
of those fallacious chivalries of feeling which are the danger of
sensitive and imaginative minds. Religion strengthened it, as it is so
apt to strengthen any form of self-destruction, short of technical
suicide. There was but a month to their marriage when we met. For us it
was a month of rapture and agonies, of heaven shot through with hell. I
saw further than she. I begged her at least to wait a year; but the
force of my appeal was weakened by scruples similar to her own. To rob
another of his happiness is an act from which we may well shrink, though
we can clearly see that the happiness was really destined for us, and
can never be his in any like degree.
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