voted every evening to him that I could
spare from my work. He suffered acutely, but was perfectly calm and
hardly ever moved a muscle.

"I seldom indulge in the luxury of whining," he said to me once, as I
was seated at his bedside. "But, if I should die, as I believe I
shall, it would be a pity if the lesson of my life should be lost to
humanity. It is the only valuable thing I leave behind me, except,
perhaps, my furniture, which I bequeath to you."

He lay for a while looking with grave criticism at his long, lean
fingers, and then told me the following story, of which I shall give a
brief _resume_.

* * * * *

Some ten years ago, while he was yet in the university, he had made
the acquaintance of a young girl, Emily Gerstad, the daughter of a
widow in whose house he lived. She was a wild unruly thing, full of
coquettish airs, frivolous as a kitten, but for all that, a phenomenon
of most absorbing interest. She was a blonde of the purest Northern
type, with a magnificent wealth of thick curly hair and a pair of blue
eyes, which seemed capable of expressing the very finest things that
God ever deposited in a woman's nature. It was useless to disapprove
of her, and to argue with her on the error of her ways was a waste of
breath: her moral nature was too fatally flexible. She could assume
with astonishing facility a hundred different attitudes on the same
question, and acted the penitent, the indifferent, the defiant, with
such a perfection of art as really to deceive herself. And in spite of
all this, poor Storm soon found that she had wound herself so closely
about his heart, that the process of unwinding, as he expressed it,
would require greater strength and a sterner philosophy than he
believed himself to possess. He had always been shy of women, not
because he distrusted them, but because he was painfully conscious of
being, in point of physical finish, a second-rate article, a bungling
piece of work, and naturally felt his disadvantages more keenly in the
presence of those upon whom Nature had expended all her best art. He
was, according to his own assertion, an idealist by temperament, and
had kept a sacred chamber in his heart where the vestal fire burned
with a pure flame. Now the deepest strata of his being were stirred,
and he loved with an overwhelming fervor and intensity which fairly
frightened him. In a moment of abject despair he proposed to Emily,
and to his surpri