a dunghill; the age in which the Romish Church had made
marriage a legalized tyranny, and the laity, by a natural and pardonable
revulsion, had exalted adultery into a virtue and a science? That all
love was lust; that all women had their price; that profligacy, though
an ecclesiastical sin, was so pardonable, if not necessary, as to be
hardly a moral sin, were notions which Eustace must needs have gathered
from the hints of his preceptors; for their written works bear to this
day fullest and foulest testimony that such was their opinion; and that
their conception of the relation of the sexes was really not a whit
higher than that of the profligate laity who confessed to them. He
longed to marry Rose Salterne, with a wild selfish fury; but only that
he might be able to claim her as his own property, and keep all others
from her. Of her as a co-equal and ennobling helpmate; as one in whose
honor, glory, growth of heart and soul, his own were inextricably wrapt
up, he had never dreamed. Marriage would prevent God from being angry
with that, with which otherwise He might be angry; and therefore the
sanction of the Church was the more "probable and safe" course. But as
yet his suit was in very embryo. He could not even tell whether Rose
knew of his love; and he wasted miserable hours in maddening thoughts,
and tost all night upon his sleepless bed, and rose next morning fierce
and pale, to invent fresh excuses for going over to her uncle's house,
and lingering about the fruit which he dared not snatch.

CHAPTER IV

THE TWO WAYS OF BEING CROST IN LOVE

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."--LOVELACE.

And what all this while has become of the fair breaker of so many
hearts, to whom I have not yet even introduced my readers?

She was sitting in the little farm-house beside the mill, buried in the
green depths of the valley of Combe, half-way between Stow and Chapel,
sulking as much as her sweet nature would let her, at being thus
shut out from all the grand doings at Bideford, and forced to keep a
Martinmas Lent in that far western glen. So lonely was she, in fact,
that though she regarded Eustace Leigh with somewhat of aversion, and
(being a good Protestant) with a great deal of suspicion, she could not
find it in her heart to avoid a chat with him whenever he came down to
the farm and to its mill, which he contrived to do, on I know not what
would-be errand, almost every day. Her