George Howard was alone in the world. His mother had died early; his father went off when George was twenty, leaving him fortune enough to help him to make life as pleasant as he chose to make it for himself. He was advancing rapidly in his profession--law--and had made a host of friends when the collapse came. As is so often the case, his pride, instead of sustaining him, sank under the blow. Most probably, if the truth were told, the wound inflicted on his self-esteem rankled deeper than that which had killed his love. The thought that another man could succeed where George Howard had failed would have been gall and wormwood to him in any case; but when the object of rivalry was a woman's heart, and George Howard's were the rejected addresses, death would be a small word to express the consummation of that gentleman's misery; it was the annihilation of all that made life worth the living. "Howard the jilted," he seemed to read in everybody's eye, when perhaps not half a dozen persons knew anything about the affair. Jilted by a girl! How could a man recover such a blow? What was there in the wide world to fill up the void left in one when his mighty self shrank to such insignificant proportions?
Common sense might have suggested that there was more than one woman in the world, and that there lay a deeper fund of love in the heart of a man than could be exhausted on the first girl he chanced to meet and admire. It might have suggested also that failure in love did not necessarily mean failure in matters which, after all, as far as the world outside of our little selves is concerned, are of far more importance than love. Man is not sent into this world for the one purpose of being "married and done for," as the phrase goes. But when did common sense find the ear of a lover, particularly of a lover rejected?
So here was George Howard, clever enough, good-looking enough, and by no means a bad fellow, self-stranded on the barren sand-banks of life, with a short five-and-twenty years behind him, a future full of fair promise still before him, hugging a useless sorrow in silent sadness, and making that his bride.
He lived on listlessly from day to day. He mixed with no circle; he knew nobody. He took his meals at his hotel, addressed a few commonplaces to those he happened to meet, and passed most of his time in the open air, taking long strolls into the country, walking up and down the beach by the sea, watching the solitary sails that came and went and faded out of sight--sadly, it seemed to him sometimes, as though beckoning him back to a living world. There were few visitors at the little town, save just during the hottest of the summer months. Such as did come hurried away again as fast as they could. The train rushed through it day after day, a crowd of peering faces would show themselves a few moments at the windows of the cars, strange eyes would stare curiously at the strange place, and pass on a moment after as indifferent as before. Something of the instinct which prompts a wounded animal to seek out a silent covert where it may lie down with its wound and die alone, must have conducted George Howard to this spot.