much," answered Edward calmly, "to be satisfied with
a bare refusal. Tell me what are your plans for the dear girl, and I
shall learn to bear them with resignation."

"And she, the little fool!" interposed the old man hastily, "has she
too tumbled in love with you? Has the luckless word already past to
and fro betwixt you?"

"No," replied Edward; "her pure youth is still hovering in that happy
state of simplicity, which only desires that tomorrow may be just like
today and yesterday. She has no wishes but the simple ones of a
child."

"So much the better," said Balthasar; "she will be ready to act
rationally then, and will not throw any hinderance in the way of my
plan. Surely you, who are tolerably well acquainted with me, ought to
have perceived long ago that I had designed the child for Eleazar. I
mean her to marry, to live in sober wedlock, not to dream away and
dote in what you call love."

"And will she," askt Edward, "be happy with him for her husband?"

"Happy!" cried the old man, bursting into a kind of loud laugh;
"happy! What is a man to think of when he hears that word? There is no
happiness; there is no unhappiness; only pain, which we are to welcome
to our arms, only self-contempt, beneath which we must bow our necks,
only hopelessness, which we must make the partner of our table and of
our bed. Everything else is a lie and a trick. Life is a spectre,
before which, whenever I pause to look upon it, I stand shuddering:
and nothing but toil and activity, and straining all my faculties, can
enable me to endure and to despise it. I could envy the loom and the
spinning-jenny, if such a feeling, such a wish had any sense in it:
for what is our consciousness but a consciousness of misery? what is
our existence but an unveiling of the madness, the frenzy of all life?
to which we either abandon ourselves in chill patience, or weep and
struggle against it convulsively, or play through a caricature of
happiness and joy, while in our dreary heart we are fully aware that
it is all a wanton lie."

"Neither then must I ask you," continued Edward quietly and
sorrowfully, "whether you love Eleazar as a friend, whether he is
truly worthy of friendship and esteem; for all freedom of will, every
movement of feeling is crusht by these dark thoughts."

"As if I had not felt," said Balthasar, "and wept and laught, like
other men. The difference is only, that I soon stript truth naked, and
that I acknowledged and felt m