vouchsafe, and let me at least profit by your counsel if you refuse to
give me your aid."

Rapidly, briefly, I went on to say how I had first seen Lilian, and
how sudden, how strange to myself, had been the impression which that
first sight of her had produced.

"You remarked the change that had come over me," said I; "you
divined the cause before I divined it myself,--divined it as I sat there
beside you, thinking that through you I might see, in the freedom of
social intercourse, the face that was then haunting me. You know what has
since passed. Miss Ashleigh is ill; her case is, I am convinced, wholly
misunderstood. All other feelings are merged in one sense of anxiety,--of
alarm. But it has become due to me, due to all, to incur the risk of your
ridicule even more than of your reproof, by stating to you thus candidly,
plainly, bluntly, the sentiment which renders alarm so poignant, and
which, if scarcely admissible to the romance of some wild dreamy boy, may
seem an unpardonable folly in a man of my years and my sober calling,--due
to me, to you, to Mrs. Ashleigh, because still the dearest thing in life
to me is honour. And if you, who know Mrs. Ashleigh so intimately, who
must be more or less aware of her plans or wishes for her daughter's
future,--if you believe that those plans or wishes lead to a lot far more
ambitious than an alliance with me could offer to Miss Ashleigh, then aid
Mr. Vigors in excluding me from the house; aid me in suppressing a
presumptuous, visionary passion. I cannot enter that house without love
and hope at my heart; and the threshold of that house I must not cross if
such love and such hope would be a sin and a treachery in the eyes of its
owner. I might restore Miss Ashleigh to health; her gratitude might--I
cannot continue. This danger must not be to me nor to her, if her mother
has views far above such a son-in-law. And I am the more bound to