e her.' These feelings
have led me on; they have stood by me through all dangers; and now I
find myself like one who has arrived at his goal, who has overcome
every difficulty and who has nothing more left in his way. Ottilie is
mine, and whatever lies between the thought and the execution of it, I
can only regard as unimportant."

"With a few strokes you blot out," replied the Major, "all the
objections that we can or ought to urge upon you, and yet they must be
repeated. I must leave it to yourself to recall the full value of your
relation with your wife; but you owe it to her, and you owe it to
yourself, not to close your eyes to it. How can I so much as recollect
that you have had a son given to you, without acknowledging at once that
you two belong to each other forever; that you are bound, for this
little creature's sake, to live united, that united you may educate it
and provide for its future welfare?"

"It is no more than the blindness of parents," answered Edward, "when
they imagine their existence to be of so much importance to their
children. Whatever lives, finds nourishment and finds assistance; and if
the son who has early lost his father does not spend so easy, so favored
a youth, he profits, perhaps, for that very reason, in being trained
sooner for the world, and comes to a timely knowledge that he must
accommodate himself to others, a thing sooner or later we are all forced
to learn. Here, however even these considerations are irrelevant; we
are sufficiently well off to be able to provide for more children than
one, and it is neither right nor kind to accumulate so large a property
on a single head."

The Major attempted to say something of Charlotte's worth, and Edward's
long-standing attachment to her; but the latter hastily interrupted him.
"We committed ourselves to a foolish thing, that I see all too clearly.
Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his
early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life
has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. Woe to him who,
either by circumstances or by his own infatuation, is induced to grasp
at anything before him or behind him. We have done a foolish thing. Are
we to abide by it all our lives? Are we, from some respect of prudence,
to refuse to ourselves what the customs of the age do not forbid? In how
many matters do men recall their intentions and their actions; and shall
it not be allowed t