talents which, even at such a moment, paralysing minds less energetic,
have sustained me:"--and therewith he poured several pieces of gold and
silver on the table beside her chair.

"Gustave," then said Isaura, "I am well pleased that you thus prove that
I was not mistaken when I thought and said that, despite all appearances,
all errors, your heart was good. Oh, do but follow its true impulses,
and--"

"Its impulses lead me ever to thy feet," interrupted Gustave, with a
fervour which sounded somewhat theatrical and hollow.

The girl smiled, not bitterly, not mockingly; but Gustave did not like
the smile.

"Poor Gustave," she said, with a melancholy pathos in her soft voice,
"do you not understand that the time has come when such commonplace
compliments ill suit our altered positions to each other? Nay, listen to
me patiently; and let not my words in this last interview pain you to
recall. If either of us be to blame in the engagement hastily
contracted, it is I. Gustave, when you, exaggerating in your imagination
the nature of your sentiments for me, said with such earnestness that on
my consent to our union depended your health, your life, your career;
that if I withheld that consent you were lost, and in despair would seek
distraction from thought in all from which your friends, your mother, the
duties imposed upon Genius for the good of Man to the ends of God, should
withhold and save you--when you said all this, and I believed it, I felt
as if Heaven commanded me not to desert the soul which appealed to me in
the crisis of its struggle and peril. Gustave, I repent; I was to
blame."