fect expression of
the powers of mankind--I shall be able to laugh with a better grace at
your passing and natural incredulity. To what can you aspire--fame,
riches, power, the charm of youth, the dear-bought wisdom of age--that I
shall not be able to afford you in perfection? Do not deceive yourself.
I already excel you in every human gift but one: when that gift also has
been restored to me you will recognise your master."

Hereupon, consulting his watch, he told me he must now leave me to
myself; and bidding me consult reason, and not girlish fancies, he
withdrew. I had not the courage to move; the night fell, and found me
still where he had laid me during my faint, my face buried in my hands,
my soul drowned in the darkest apprehensions. Late in the evening he
returned, carrying a candle, and, with a certain irritable tremor, bade
me rise and sup. "Is it possible," he added, "that I have been deceived
in your courage? A cowardly girl is no fit mate for me."

I flung myself before him on my knees, and with floods of tears besought
him to release me from this engagement, assuring him that my cowardice
was abject, and that in every point of intellect and character I was his
hopeless and derisible inferior.

"Why, certainly," he replied. "I know you better than yourself; and I am
well enough acquainted with human nature to understand this scene. It is
addressed to me," he added with a smile, "in my character of the still
untransformed. But do not alarm yourself about the future. Let me but
attain my end, and not you only, Asenath, but every woman on the face of
the earth becomes my willing slave."

Thereupon he obliged me to rise and eat; sat down with me to table;
helped and entertained me with the attentions of a fashionable host; and
it was not till a late hour that, bidding me courteously good-night, he
once more left me alone to my misery.

In all this talk of an elixir and the restoration of his youth, I
scarce knew from which hypothesis I should the more eagerly recoil. If
his hopes reposed on any base of fact, if, indeed, by some abhorrent
miracle, he should discard his age, death were my only refuge from that
most unnatural, that most ungodly union. If, on the other hand, these
dreams were merely lunatic, the madness of a life waxed suddenly acute,
my pity would become a load almost as heavy to bear as my revolt against
the marriage. So passed the night, in alternations of rebellion and
despair, of hate an