subtile and difficult noose, not to be so easily undone!

"Now see what strange, variable fools we are! Months of tender
intercourse had failed to bring about anything like a positive
engagement between Margaret and myself; and here behold me irrevocably
pledged to Flora, after a brief ten-days' acquaintance!

"Six mortal hours were exhausted in making the steamer fast,--in
sending off her Majesty's mails, of which the cockney speaks with a
tone of reverence altogether disgusting to us free-minded
Yankees,--and in entertaining the custom-house inspectors, who paid a
long and tedious visit to the saloon and our luggage. Then we were
suffered to land, and enter the noisy, solid streets of Liverpool,
amid the donkeys and beggars and quaint scenes which strike the
American so oddly upon a first visit. All this delay, the weariness
and impatience, the contrast between the morning and the hard, grim
reality of mid-day, brought me down from my elevation. I felt alarmed
to think of what had passed. I seemed to have been doing some wild,
unadvised act in a fit of intoxication. Margaret came up before me,
sad, silent, reproachful; and as I gazed upon Flora's bedimmed face, I
wondered how I had been so charmed.

"We took the first train for London, where we arrived at midnight. Two
weeks in that vast Babel,--then, ho! for Paris! Twelve hours by rail
and steamer carried us out of John Bull's dominions into the brilliant
metropolis of his French neighbor. Joseph accompanied us, and wrote
letters home, filled with gossip which I knew, or hoped, would make
Margaret writhe. I had not found it so easy to forget her as I had
supposed it would be. Flora's power over me was sovereign; but when I
was weary of the dazzle and whirl of the life she led me,--when I