made us feel how high love was. The forest inclosed
us, and made us understand that love was large. The holiness of beauty
was the hostess of our delight. Oh, I had won her! She was my wife.
She was my own. She loved me.

If I cherished her as my own soul, what could I give her back, who had
given herself to me?

I said, "I will make you the happiest woman who was ever beloved by man
upon this earth."

"But you _have_," she whispered, lifting her dear face. "It is worth
being alive for, if it came to an end to-morrow."

"Love has no end," I cried. "Happiness is life. It cannot die. It
has an immortal soul. If ever I make you sad, if I am untender to
you,--may God strike me"--

"Hush," she cried, clinging to me, and closing my lips with a kiss for
which I would have died; "Hush, love! hush!"

CHAPTER III.

It ought to be said, at this point in my story, that I had never been
what would be called an even-tempered man. Truth to tell, I was a
spoiled boy. My mother was a saint, but she was a soft-hearted one.
My father was a scholar. Like many another boy of decided
individuality, I came up anyhow. Nobody managed me. At an early age
my profession made it my duty to manage everybody else. I had a
nervous temperament to start on; neither my training nor my occupation
had poised it. I do not think I was malicious nor even ill-natured.
As men go, I was perhaps a kind man. The thing which I am trying to
say is, that I was an irritable one.

As I look back upon the whole subject I can see, from my present point
of view, that this irritability had seldom struck me as a personal
disadvantage. I do not think it usually makes that impression upon
temperaments similarly vitiated. As nearly as I can remember, I
thought of myself rather as the possessor of an eccentricity, than as
the victim of a vice. My father was an overworked college
professor,--a quick-tempered man; my mother,--so he told me with
streaming tears, upon the day that he buried her,--my mother never
spoke one irritated word to him in all her life: he had chafed and she
had soothed, he had slashed and she had healed, from the beginning to
the end of their days together. A boy imitates for so many years
before he reflects, that the liberty to say what one felt like saying
appeared to me a mere identification of sex long before it occurred to
me that mine might not be the only sex endowed by nature with this form
of expression. I r