e wishes you to go to India?"

"Yes."

"Madness!" she exclaimed. "You would not live three months there, I am
certain. You never shall go: you have not consented, have you, Jane?"

"I have refused to marry him--"

"And have consequently displeased him?" she suggested.

"Deeply: he will never forgive me, I fear: yet I offered to accompany him
as his sister."

"It was frantic folly to do so, Jane. Think of the task you
undertook--one of incessant fatigue, where fatigue kills even the strong,
and you are weak. St. John--you know him--would urge you to
impossibilities: with him there would be no permission to rest during the
hot hours; and unfortunately, I have noticed, whatever he exacts, you
force yourself to perform. I am astonished you found courage to refuse
his hand. You do not love him then, Jane?"

"Not as a husband."

"Yet he is a handsome fellow."

"And I am so plain, you see, Die. We should never suit."

"Plain! You? Not at all. You are much too pretty, as well as too good,
to be grilled alive in Calcutta." And again she earnestly conjured me to
give up all thoughts of going out with her brother.

"I must indeed," I said; "for when just now I repeated the offer of
serving him for a deacon, he expressed himself shocked at my want of
decency. He seemed to think I had committed an impropriety in proposing
to accompany him unmarried: as if I had not from the first hoped to find
in him a brother, and habitually regarded him as such."

"What makes you say he does not love you, Jane?"

"You should hear himself on the subject. He has again and again
explained that it is not himself, but his office he wishes to mate. He
has told me I am formed for labour--not for love: which is true, no
doubt. But, in my opinion, if I am not formed for love, it follows that
I am not formed for marriage. Would it not be strange, Die, to be
chained for life to a man who regarded one but as a useful tool?"

"Insupportable--unnatural--out of the question!"

"And then," I continued, "though I have only sisterly affection for him
now, yet, if forced to be his wife, I can imagine the possibility of
conceiving an inevitable, strange, torturing kind of love for him,
because he is so talented; and there is often a certain heroic grandeur
in his look, manner, and conversation. In that case, my lot would become
unspeakably wretched. He would not want me to love him; and if I showed
the feeling, he would make me sen