Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/205

 of her presence--"Ah! I said to myself, 'Oh, she believes that she has been so mourned and missed that my soul would spring back to her false smile; that I could be so base a slave to my senses as to pardon the traitress because her face was fair enough to haunt my dreams. She dupes herself; she is no necessity to my existence--I have wrenched it from her power years, long years ago! I will show her, since again she deigns to remember me, that I am not so old as to be grateful for the leavings of a heart.

"I will love another--I will be beloved. She shall not say with secret triumph, 'The old man dotes in rejecting me'"

"Darrell, Darrel--unjus--cruel kill me rather than talk thus!"

He heeded not her cry. His words rolled on in that wonderful, varying music which, whether in tenderness or in wrath, gave to his voice a magical power--fascinating, hushing, overmastering human souls.

"But--you have the triumph; see, I am still alone! I sought the world of the young--the marriage mart of the Beautiful once more. Alas! if my eye was captured for a moment, it was by something that reminded me of you. I saw a faultless face, radiant with its virgin blush; moved to it, I drew near-sighing, turned away; it was not you! I heard the silvery laugh of a life fresh as an April morn. 'Hark!' I said, 'is not that the sweet mirth-note at which all my cares were dispelled? Listening, I forgot my weight of years. Why? because listening, I remembered you. 'Heed not the treacherous blush and the beguiling laugh,' whispered Prudence. 'Seek in congenial mind a calm companion to thine own.' Mind! O frigid pedantry! Mind!--had not yours been a volume open to my eyes; in every page, methought, some lovely poet-truth never revealed to human sense before! No; you had killed to me all womanhood! Woo another!--wed another! 'Hush,' I said, 'it shall be. Eighteen years since we parted--seeing her not, she remains eternally the same! Seeing her again, the very change that time must have brought will cure. I saw you--all the past rushed back in that stolen moment. I fled--never more to dream that I can shake off the curse of memory--blent with each drop of my blood--woven with each tissue-throbbing in each nerve-bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh--poison-root