son--might do something, write something. "I also am of Arcadia." He
might have done it or not--the genius may or may not have been there; but
the ambition certainly was. Could he have thrown it all aside? And Why?

Not for mere love of money; she knew him too well for that. He was a
thorough book-worm, simple in all his tastes and habits--simple almost to
penuriousness; but it was a penuriousness born of hard fortunes, and he
never allowed it to affect any body but himself. Still, there was no
doubt he did not care for money, or luxury, or worldly position--any of
the things that lesser men count large enough to work and struggle and
die for. To give up the pursuits he loved, deliberately to choose
others, to change his whole life thus, and expatriate himself, as it
were, for years--perhaps for always--why did he do it, or for whom?

Was it for a woman? Was it for her? If ever, in those long empty days
and wakeful nights, this last thought entered Fortune's mind, she stifled
it as something which, once to have fully believed and then disbelieved
would have killed her.

That she should have done the like for him--that or any thing else
involving any amount of heroism or self-sacrifice--well, it was natural,
right; but that he should do it for her? That he should change his whole
purpose of life that he might be able to marry quickly, to shelter in his
bosom a poor girl who was not able to fight the world as a man could,
the thing--not so very impossible, after all--seemed to her almost
incredible! And yet (I am telling a mere love story, remember--a
foolish, innocent love story, without apologizing for either the folly or
the innocence) sometimes she was so far "left to herself," as the Scotch
say, that she did believe it: in the still twilights, in the wakeful
nights, in the one solitary half hour of intense relief, when, all her