Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/515

  I could offer you another. I desire to make you my wife. I beg you to accept my hand."

"Accept your hand! What, now? directly? to-day?" she exclaimed almost piteously, and tears trembled on her eyelashes.

"Yes," he answered, repeating her words with something like ardour. "Now, directly, to-day. I am sorely in want of a wife, and would fain take you home as soon as the bans would let me. Emily?"

"Why you have been taking all possible pains to let me know that you do not love me in the least, and that, as far as you foresee, you do not mean to love me," she answered, two great tears falling on his hand when he tried to take hers. "John! how dare you!"

She was not naturally passionate, but startled now into this passionate appeal, she snatched away her hand, rose in haste, and drew back from him with flashing eyes and a heaving bosom; but all too soon the short relief she had found in anger was quenched in tears that she did not try to check. She stood and wept, and he, very pale and very much discomfited, sat before her in his place.

"I beg your pardon," he presently said, not in the least aware of what this really meant. "I beg — I entreat your pardon, I scarcely thought — forgive my saying it — I scarcely thought, considering our past — and — and — my position, as the father of a large family, that you would have consented to any wooing in the girl and boy fashion. You make me wish, for once in my life — yes, very heartily wish, that I had been less direct, less candid," he added rather bitterly. "I thought" — here Emily heard him call himself a fool — "I thought you would approve it."

"I do," she answered with a great sobbing sigh. Oh, there was nothing more for her to say; she could not entreat him now to let her teach him to love her. She felt, with a sinking heart, that if he took her words for a refusal, and by no means a gentle one, it could not be wondered at.

Presently he said, still looking amazed and pale, for he was utterly unused to a woman's tears, and as much agitated now in a man's fashion as she was in hers, ——

"If I have spoken earlier in your widowhood than you approve, and it displeases you, I hope you will believe that I have always thought of you as a wife to be admired above any that I ever knew."

"My husband loved me," she answered, drying her eyes, now almost calmly. She could not say she was displeased on his account, and when she looked up she saw that John Mortimer had his hat in his hand. Their interview was nearly over.

"I cannot lose you as a friend," he said, and his voice faltered.

"Oh no; no, dear John."

"And my children are so fond of you."

"I love them; I always shall."

He looked at her for a moment, doubtful whether to hold out his hand. "Forget this, Emily, and let things be as they have been heretofore between us."

"Yes," she answered, and gave him her hand.

"Good-bye," he said, and stooped to kiss it, and was gone.

 

 From The Athenæum. Author:John Elliott Cairnes

more than two years have passed since the greatest of modern political economists died at Avignon, and last Monday the clods were laid at Willesden over all that could be buried of the greatest of his disciples. The first loss came as a terrible shock to those who knew and valued Mr. Mill's services to the world as a thinker and teacher; for, though he had reached the age of sixty-seven, no one could have anticipated, till within a few days of his death, that there were not many years of life and work before him. The second loss can have surprised no one who was at all acquainted with the state of Mr. Cairnes's health during the last three years. He has died at the age of fifty-one, when his ripe mind seemed fitted to render services to the world which would far surpass all the excellent work he had already done; yet surely there is not one of all the friends who loved him who could have wished that his bodily agonies should be prolonged even one day longer for the sake of any public good that might issue from his life. His death, when a kindlier fate might have enabled him to work on bravely and worthily for many years longer — long enough, at any rate, to complete that splendid scheme for the exposition of his favourite science on which his heart was set — is a cruel blow to the 