"No, Miss Darley!" Dudley Venner said, almost sternly. "You must not
speak to a man who has lived through my experiences of looking about for
a new choice after his heart has once chosen. Say that you can never
love me; say that I have lived too long to share your young life; say
that sorrow has left nothing in me for Love to find his pleasure in; but
do not mock me with the hope of a new affection for some unknown object.
The first look of yours brought me to your side. The first tone of your
voice sunk into my heart. From this moment my life must wither out or
bloom anew. My home is desolate. Come under my roof and make it bright
once more,--share my life with me,--or I shall give the halls of the old
mansion to the bats and the owls, and wander forth alone without a hope
or a friend!"

To find herself with a man's future at the disposal of a single word of
hers!--a man like this, too, with a fascination for her against which
she had tried to shut her heart, feeling that he lived in another sphere
than hers, working as she was for her bread, a poor operative in the
factory of a hard master and jealous overseer, the salaried drudge of
Mr. Silas Peckham! Why, she had thought he was grateful to her as a
friend of his daughter; she had even pleased herself with the feeling
that he liked her, in her humble place, as a woman of some cultivation
and many sympathetic! points of relation with himself; but that he
_loved_ her,--that this deep, fine nature, in a man so far removed from
her in outward circumstance, should have found its counterpart in one
whom life had treated so coldly as herself,--that Dudley Venner should
stake his happiness on a breath of hers,--poor Helen Darley's,--it was
all a surprise, a confusion, a kind of fear not wholly fearful. Ah, me!
women know what it is,--that mist over the eyes, that trembling in the
limbs, that faltering of the voice, that sweet, shame-faced, unspoken
confession of weakness which does not wish to be strong, that sudden