te his life in desolation, because he has been
disappointed? Or does his old love perish and die away, because another
has crept into his heart? No; the first love, if that was true, is ever
there; and should she and he meet after many years, though their heads
be gray and their cheeks wrinkled, there will still be a touch of the
old passion as their hands meet for a moment. Methinks that love never
dies, unless it be murdered by downright ill-usage. It may be so
murdered, but even, ill-usage will more often fail than succeed in that
enterprise. How, then, could Harry fail to love the woman whom he had
loved first, when she returned to him still young, still beautiful, and
told him, with all her charms and all her flattery, how her heart stood
toward him?

But it is not to be thought that I excuse him altogether. A man, though
he may love many, should be devoted only to one. The man's feeling to
the woman whom he is to marry should be this:--that not from love only,
but from chivalry, from manhood, and from duty, he will be prepared
always, and at all hazards, to defend her from every misadventure, to
struggle ever that she may be happy, to see that no wind blows upon her
with needless severity, that no ravening wolf of a misery shall come
near her, that her path be swept clean for her--as clean as may be, and
that her roof-tree be made firm upon a rock. There is much of this which
is quite independent of love--much of it that may be done without love.
This is devotion, and it is this which a man owes to the woman who has
once promised to be his wife, and has not forfeited her right. Doubtless
Harry Clavering should have remembered this at the first moment of his
weakness in Lady Ongar's drawing-room. Doubtless he should have known at
once that his duty to Florence made it necessary that he should declare
his engagement--even though, in doing so, he might have seemed to
caution Lady Ongar on that point on which no woman can endure a caution.
But the fault was hers, and the caution was needed. No doubt he should
not have returned to Bolton Street. He should not have cozened himself
by trusting himself to her assurances of friendship; he should have kept
warm his love for the woman to whom his hand was owed, not suffering
himself to make comparisons to her injury. He should have been
chivalric, manly, full of high duty. He should have been all this, and
full also of love, and then he would have been a hero. But men as I se