"You are poor, you say, my dear Fred. Now papa is rich, and ambitious of being richer. Alas! you must be satisfied with----"
"What?--your friendship? Oh, Gertrude, can you speak so coldly, and to me?"
"You overrate my powers of endurance. To be your friend, and even that only in secret,--to see you, after your avowal to me, the wife of another perhaps, rendering all my existence hereafter a blank."
"I do not mean that, Fred. Alas! I know not what I do mean," she added, weeping so bitterly that my heart was pained.
"Mean--say that you will be mine, and not the wife of this mysterious other."
"To-morrow I shall be here again--to-morrow shall end all!"
She held up her sweet face; no one seemed near. With the speed of thought I pressed my lips to hers--for the first and the last time on this side of the grave, as it proved--and we separated in a tumult of joy.
Next day I kept my appointment without fail, but not without difficulty, as I had a long and troublesome operation to perform in a totally different direction, near Wimpole Street. I waited till I could linger no longer, and quitted the park slowly, filled by doubts and dread, and by the hope that visitors--something unavoidable--anything but illness, caprice, or change of mind--had prevented my bright Gertrude from meeting me.
If her beauty, humility, and sweetness dazzled and won me on one hand, her father's insolent hauteur--for, like her brother, the Guardsman, he always "cut me dead" in the street--piqued me on the other. I was a gentleman by birth and education as well as either, and what was more, I was the graduate of an ancient university; yet I disdained to risk being stigmatised as a fortune-hunter, which would surely be said of me, as Gertrude had some eight thousand pounds yearly of her own. But the girl loved me, and the conviction of that rendered me blind to everything.
The morning of the second day brought me a note from her, dated from St. George's Place.
We had met again and again by arrangement, but never had I got a note from her, and I read and kissed it a score of times, and committed many other absurdities while studying the bad writing, which somehow seemed totally unlike that of a lady; but then poor Gertrude had never ventured to write to me before.