For regard it as weakness or
not, the recollection that the vision I had seen wore the garments of
a working- woman rather than a lady, acted upon me like a warning not
to search for her any longer among the resorts of the welldressed,
but in the regions of poverty and toil. I therefore took to
wanderings such as I have no heart to describe. Nor do I need to, if,
as you have informed me, I have been followed.
"The result was almost madness. Though deep in my heart I felt a
steadfast trust in the purity of her intentions, the fear of what she
might have been driven to by the awful poverty and despair I every day
saw seething about me, was like hot steel in brain and heart. Then
her father and her brother! To what might they not have forced her,
innocent and loving soul though she was! Drinking the dregs of a cup
such as I had never considered it possible for me to taste, I got so
far as to believe that her eyes would yet flash upon me from beneath
some of the tattered shawls I saw sullying the forms of the young
girls upon which I hourly stumbled. Yes, and even made a move to
see my cousin, if haply I could so win upon her compassion as to gain
her consent to shelter the poor creature of my dreams in case the
necessity came. But my heart failed me at the sight of her cold face
above the splendor she had bought with her charms, and I was saved a
humiliation I might never have risen above.
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