Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/18

Rh and the company she keep; and if she does not keep him thus informed, he has fair and just grounds to infer that her actions are such as ought to be hidden from his gaze, and also from that of humanity at large.

If innocent, she is still guilty of a great folly: while your trouble and pain may really have no more solid foundation than vague and empty air. Let justice rule on both sides; for she was unwise, while your illness tortures things out of shape, till mere phasmas assume forms as solid in appearance as the very truth itself; and it mav be that your anxiety and sympathy may have conjured up a lie; and this apparently recusant woman really be as unsoiled as the down upon the ring-dove's breast, or the spotless plume of an angel's wing! Oh, how my heart, for my friend, clung to that hope! My soul to my soul went on: They twain, the far-off couple, are young; are adapted to each other: you (my friend, of course) are too old for her. You had no right to subject her to the terrible temptation of being away from your side for months together, in the midst of gay people, where everything appealed to and impressed her young heart and fancy, and made a wider gulf between herself and you. I know your heart is bleeding, that hot tears are streaming down your face, that your poor soul is sweltering amidst the tortuous flames of the fiercest hell of jealousy; yet why? for one who loves you not!—who is heartless to you, heartful to her paramour! Be a man! and remember that she, too, has rights which you are bound to respect;—not the right to dishonor, but to be free from you by laws human and divine, and to make such choice and legal disposal of herself as her youth demands, and her will, soul, and conscience prompt.

If she has fallen, it is the fault of her husband, not altogether her own. She admires him, but probably loves this distant Adonis, and, tempted beyond her strength, she may have forgotten and neglected duty, at the urgence and call of love; the facts of which came rushing through the air to you and took form and shape through the vision of the seer.

Be magnanimous! and if ye twain part, as ye likely will, and forever, do not fail to recognize the end as the legitimate result of the stupid folly of allowing her to dwell so far away in the midst of