Prue has such a reasonable way of putting these things!

Our cousin came home and found Flora and the young foreigner
conversing. The young foreigner had large, soft, black eyes, and the
dusky skin of the tropics. His manner was languid and fascinating,
courteous and reserved. It assumed a natural supremacy, and you felt
as if here were a young prince travelling before he came into
possession of his realm.

It is an old fable that love is blind. But I think there are no eyes
so sharp as those of lovers. I am sure there is not a shade upon
Prue's brow that I do not instantly remark, nor an altered tone in her
voice that I do not instantly observe. Do you suppose Aurelia would
not note the slightest deviation of heart in her lover, if she had
one? Love is the coldest of critics. To be in love is to live in a
crisis, and the very imminence of uncertainty makes the lover
perfectly self-possessed. His eye constantly scours the horizon. There
is no footfall so light that it does not thunder in his ear. Love is
tortured by the tempest the moment the cloud of a hand's size rises
out of the sea. It foretells its own doom; its agony is past before
its sufferings are known.

Our cousin the curate no sooner saw the tropical stranger, and marked
his impression upon Flora, than he felt the end. As the shaft struck
his heart, his smile was sweeter, and his homage even more poetic and
reverential. I doubt if Flora understood him or herself. She did not
know, what he instinctively perceived, that she loved him less. But
there are no degrees in love; when it is less than absolute and
supreme, it is nothing. Our cousin and Flora were not formally