Welsh Journals

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.WHAT CANNOT LOVE DO. 123 movements only became apparently quiet at last, when he mur¬ mured to himself, as he entered his hotel on the last night of his explorations at Torquay— " Well, there's an end! Very likely 'tis all for the best. But, best or worst, I'll try no more." The journey to London next day was for some time a chaos of emotion and thought, through which nothing appeared clear —a vista of gloom, leading to what terrible goal he knew not— nor cared even to fear. But calming at last, so that he could think and put his thoughts into something like shape and orderly array, he fell into soliloquy. " I begin to respect that father of her's, if only for the promptitude of his determination and the skill with which he worked it out. Nobody else, I do believe, could have so baffled me! " But don't I owe him something more than respect ? And," he presently added, with a laugh, " respect of such a very equivocal character ! Hasn't he taught me to know myself? And hasn't he been the first to do anything of the kind ? " And still more. Has he not actually put me in the way to disprove his own prophecies if he was thinking of my pro¬ bable future ? " Ay, but how ? It is the future, not this little noisy, turbid bit of the past that will decide. Let me recollect what it was I was so madly bent on in that call, or in some subsequent call, whenever I could have found her alone, if but for two minutes. " Well, it was this : to repeat what her father said, show he had opened my eyes, and that the result had been that I came to tell her, that she might some day tell him, my fixed purpose—to make him as my friend some day unsay his hard .sayings, by going immediately to work to create a new position, and then seek him once more. " And then ? Why, then I should have tried whether or no I could win from her any token of sympathy with my purpose; any word, or look, or trivial, but thenceforward most precious of earthly gifts, that might show what was in my heart; and, as I hoped in her's, though not then to be spoken by either. " Is all that changed ? Not a bit of it. It is not changed at all—except in the order of the two events. I wanted to secure her, if I could, first. Now my right to secure her must pre¬ cede. " So be it. And if the ultimate aim fails, there will still, I dare say, be a woman or two here and there left in the world!" And in that mood he entered London, prepared to fight his way as he best could.