fections of
those two Veronese lovers that they died when they did. In a short time
the enmity of their families would have proved a fruitful source of
dissension; Juliet would have gone back to her people, he to his; the
subject would have split them as much as it splits us.'

Pierston laughed a little. But Marcia was painfully serious, as he found
at tea-time, when she said that since his refusal to beg her pardon she
had been thinking over the matter, and had resolved to go to her aunt's
after all--at any rate till her father could be induced to agree to
their union. Pierston was as chilled by this resolve of hers as he was
surprised at her independence in circumstances which usually make
women the reverse. But he put no obstacles in her way, and, with a kiss
strangely cold after their recent ardour, the Romeo of the freestone
Montagues went out of the hotel, to avoid even the appearance of
coercing his Juliet of the rival house. When he returned she was gone.

* * *

A correspondence began between these too-hastily pledged ones; and
it was carried on in terms of serious reasoning upon their awkward
situation on account of the family feud. They saw their recent love as
what it was:

'Too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning...'

They saw it with an eye whose calmness, coldness, and, it must be added,
wisdom, did not promise well for their reunion.

Their debates were clinched by a final letter from Marcia, sent from no
other place than her recently left home in the Isle. She informed him
that her father had appeared suddenly at her aunt's, and had induced her
to go home with him. She had told her father all the circumstances of
their elopement, and what mere accidents had caused it: he had persuaded
her on what she had almost been convinced of by their disagreement,
that all thought of their marriage should be at least postponed for the
present; any awkwardness and even scandal being better than that they
should immediately unite themselves for life on the strength of a two
or three days' resultless passion, and be the wretched victims of a
situation they could never change.

Pierston saw plainly enough that he owed it to her father being a
born islander, with all the ancient island notions of matrimony lying
underneath his acquired conventions, that the stone-merchant did not
immediately insist upon the usual remedy for a daugh