Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/323

 purity, her loveliness; of his deep admiration of her; of the love she inspired in him from the first, and which he flattered himself she soon learned to reciprocate; and of his full and fixed determination to win her for his wife.

Then he told her of the obstacles which his father's more mercenary views for the greater aggrandizement of him, as his only son, had thrown in his way; and that the marriage which his father had so set his heart upon would have made his life wretched.

He explained to her that his father's disease, which was a softening of the brain, had been pronounced incurable, and that while he might live for years, any opposition would be sure to aggravate it; and that his medical attendants had plainly stated to him that to cross his wishes upon any point upon which they were strongly fixed would increase the difficulty under which he labored—would certainly be dangerous, and might prove fatal.

What, then, could he do? There was no hope of a favorable change in the future, and