in correspondence with more than one of these, and promised
to obtain all the information I sought for; meanwhile, she besought
me to devote my whole mind and thoughts to these sacred subjects,
withdrawing, so far as I might, all my desires and ambition from the
world.

Margot, I am obliged to own, contributed but little to aid my pious
purpose; her gay and joyous nature had no sympathy with asceticism and
restraint. The poets and dramatists, whose works she read in secret,
inspired very different thoughts from the subject of my studies; her
childish buoyancy could not endure the weight of that gloom which a life
of denial imposes; and whenever we were alone together, she rallied
me on my newly assumed seriousness as on a costume which I would soon
discover to be insufferable.

I dwell on these things, trifling as they are, because they convey the
curious conflict which my mind sustained at this time, and the struggle
that went on within me between the tendencies natural to my age, and the
impulses that grew out of a sudden enthusiasm. Perhaps I might not care
to recall them, if it was not that they remind me of Margot such as I
then remember her. I see her before me: her dark eyes, flashing with
daring brilliancy, dropped in a half-rebellious submission, her changing
color, her fair and open brow, her beautiful mouth, with all its varying
expression, her very gait, haughty even in its girlish gayety,--all rise
to my mind's eye; and I feel even yet within me the remembrance of that
strange distrust and bashfulness with which I endeavored to reply to her
witty sallies, and recall her to a seriousness like my own I I was no
hypocrite, and yet she half hinted that I was; neither was it a dash of
thoughtless enthusiasm that carried me away, though she often said so.
It was the very reverse of vanity or self-exaltation,--it was humility
that prompted me to devote myself to a career from which others might
have been withheld by the ties of home and affection.

"You forget, Margot," cried I one day, when she bantered me beyond
endurance, "that I am already an idle and homeless being, without one on
earth to love me!"

"But I love you, Jasper!" said she, seizing my hand and pressing it to
her lips; and then, as suddenly dropping it, she became pale as death,
and staggered as if falling. I caught her in my arms; but she disengaged
herself at once, and, with her hands pressed closely over her face, fled
from the spot.

Fro