thought no labour worth the price of a single hour of pleasure and
enjoyment. For you, how joyfully will I renounce my code! For myself I
could ask no honour: for you, I will labour for all. No toil shall be dry
to me--no pleasure shall decoy. I will renounce my idle and desultory
pursuits. I will enter the great public arena, where all who come armed
with patience and with energy are sure to win. Constance, I am not
without talents, though they have slept within me; say but the word, and
you know not what they can produce."

An irresolution in Constance was felt as a sympathy by Godolphin; he
continued,--

"We are both desolate in the world, Constance; we are orphans--friendless,
fortuneless. Yet both have made our way without friends, and commanded
our associates, though without fortune. Does not this declare we have
that within us which, when we are united, can still exalt or conquer our
destiny? And we--we--alone in the noisy and contentious world with which
we strive--we shall turn, after each effort, to our own hearts, and find
there a comfort and a shelter. All things will bind us closer and closer
to each other. The thought of our past solitude, the hope of our future
objects, will only feed the fountain of our present love. And how much
sweeter, Constance, will be honours to you, if we thus win them;
sanctified as they will be by the sacrifices we have made; by the thought
of the many hours in which we desponded, yet took consolation from each
other; by the thought how we sweetened mortifications by sympathy, and
made even the lowest successes noble by the endearing associations with
which we allied them! How much sweeter to you will be such honours than
those which you might command at once, but accompanied by a cold heart;
rendered wearisome because won with ease and low because undignified by
fame! Oh, Constance! am I not heard? Have not love, nature, sense,