would not listen to any voice that attempted, nor heed
any hand that strove to drive an entering wedge, or to divide them. Why,
then, should she trouble him by the knowledge that this effort had again
been made, and by those he trusted and honored. Let it pass. The future
must decide what the future must be, meanwhile, they were to live in a
happy present.

He learned of it, however, before he left his home. Finding that neither
persuasions, threats, nor prayers could move him,--that he would be true
to honor and love,--they told him of what they had done; laid bare the
whole intensity of their feeling; and putting her on the one side,
placing themselves on the other, said, "Choose,--this wife, or those who
have loved you for a lifetime. Cleave to her, and your father disowns
you, your mother renounces, your home shuts its doors upon you, never to
open. With the world and its judgment we have nothing to do; that is
between it and you; but no judgment of indifferent strangers shall be
more severe than ours."

A painful position; a cruel alternative; but not for an instant did he
hesitate. Taking the two hands of father and mother into his solitary
one, he said,--"Father, I have always found you a gentleman; mother, you
have shown all the graces of the Christian character which you profess;
yet in this you are supporting the most dishonorable sentiment, the most
infidel unbelief, with which the age is shamed. You are defying the
dictates of justice and the teachings of God. When you ask me to rank
myself on your side, I cannot do it. Were my heart less wholly enlisted
in this matter, my reason and sense of right would rebel. Here, then,
for the present at least, we must say farewell." And so, with many a
heart-ache and many a pang, he went away.

As true love always grows with passing time, so his increased with the
days, and intensified by the cruel heat which was poured upon it. He
realized the torture to which, in a thousand ways, this darling of his
heart had for a lifetime been subjected; and his tenderness and love--in
which was an element of indignation and pathos--deepened with every
fresh revelation of the passing hours. When he came back to her he had
few words to speak, and no airy grace of sentence or caress to bestow;
he followed her about in a curious, shadow-like way, with such a strain
on his heart as made him many a time lift his hand to it, as if to check
physical pain. For her, she was as one who had