Page:Stories after Nature.pdf/99

Rh did show her beauty to my heart, betraying so your master." And Edmund said, "Edward, are you in love?" He answered, as scorning fate, "O! aye." Edmund said, "I am glad of it." And he answered, "You will hate me soon: the woman that I love is a harlot, a common strumpet, a helpster, as the wind to the catching sail. Yet scorn me not, 'tis such a wreck! as beautiful as Eden's garden after it was damned, where fragments that the heavenly eye had fancied lay in chaotic heaps; bright grandeur disarrayed. Oh! do not scorn me, one of us is true; for I would bear greatly, were it misery here, such as men howl at; were it fear hereafter, with but a little hope in it, I would take it. Aye, any thing to make her once again a maid." Edmund, pressing his heart, said, "I am sorry for you." And he answered enthusiastically, "Sorry, for what? I am proud, man; I know of great things for this bad world to own. Last night—thou knowest how awful night and silence are to the guilty—well, in the dead and middle of the night I woke her, and in laughter (wherein there was some heart-ache, for I, poor fool, lay thinking all the night) talked to her of her state of life: bade her look round and see the shallow depth she hardly swam in: shewed that her flatterers