me to the heart
to say, but which has to be said at all costs. We must break off our
engagement at once; for the terrible truth has at last dawned upon me
that we can never afford to marry each other, and that therefore it is
only prolonging our agony to go on with it. You know me so well, dear
little girl, that you will quite understand how the thought of life-long
poverty has proved too much for me. I am not made of such coarse fibre
as most men--those men who can face squalor and privation, and lack all
the little accessories that make life endurable, without being any the
worse for it. I am too refined, too highly strung, too sensitive, to
enter upon such a weary struggle with circumstances as my marriage with
a woman as poor as myself would entail; therefore, my darling Quenelda,
much as I love you I feel it is my duty to renounce you; and as you grow
older and wiser you will see that I am right.

"Since I can not marry you whom I love, I have put romance and sentiment
forever out of my life; it is a bitter sacrifice for a man of my nature
to make, but it must be done; and I have decided to enter upon a
_mariage de convenance_ with Miss Farringdon, the Black Country
heiress. Of course I do not love her as I love you, my sweet--what man
could love a genius as he loves a beauty? And she is as cold as she is
clever. But I feel respect for her moral characteristics, and interest
in her mental ones; and, when youth and romance are over and done with,
that is all one need ask in a wife. As for her fortune, it will keep me
forever out of the reach of that poverty which has always so deleterious
an effect upon natures such as mine; and, being thus set above those
pecuniary anxieties which are the death of true art, I shall be able
fully to develop the power that is in me, and to do the work that I feel
myself called to do.

"Good-bye, my sweetest. I can not write any more; my heart is breaking.
How cruel it is that poverty should have power to separate forever such
true lovers as you and I!

"Your heartbroken
"CECIL."

Elisabeth gave back the letter to Quenelda. "Do you mean to tell me that
you don't despise the man who sent this?" she asked.

"No; because I love him, you see. You never did."

"You are right there. I never loved him. I tried to love him, but I
couldn't."

"I know you didn't. As I told you before, if you had loved him I would
have given him up to you."

Elisabeth looked at the gir