her fault, but so it was.

Robert Roy did not "make love;" not at all. Possibly he never could
have done it in the ordinary way. Sweet things, polite things were very
difficult to him either to do or to say. Even the tenderness that was in
him came out as if by accident; but, oh! how infinitely tender he could
be! Enough to make any one who loved him die easily, quietly, if only
just holding his hand.

There is an incident in Dickens's touching _Tale of two Cities_, where a
young man going innocent to the guillotine, and riding on the death-cart
with a young girl whom he had never before seen, is able to sustain and
comfort her, even to the last awful moment, by the look of his face and
the clasp of his hand. That man, I have often thought, must have been
something not unlike Robert Roy.

Such men are rare, but they do exist; and it was Fortune's lot, or she
believed it was, to have found one. That was enough. She went along
the shining sands in a dream of perfect content, perfect happiness,
thinking--and was it strange or wrong that she should so think?--that if
it were God's will she should thus walk through life, the thorniest path
would seem smooth, the hardest road easy. She had no fear of life, if
lived beside him; or of death--love is stronger than death; at least this
sort of love, of which only strong natures are capable, and out of which
are made, not the lyrics, perhaps, but the epics, the psalms, or the
tragedies of our mortal existence.

I have explained thus much about these two friends--lovers that may be,
or might have been--because they never would have done it themselves.
Neither was given to much speaking. Indeed, I fear their conversation