A painful position; a cruel alternative; but not for an instant did he hesitate.  Taking the two hands of father and mother into his solitary one, he said,—­“Father, I have always found you a gentleman; mother, you have shown all the graces of the Christian character which you profess; yet in this you are supporting the most dishonorable sentiment, the most infidel unbelief, with which the age is shamed.  You are defying the dictates of justice and the teachings of God.  When you ask me to rank myself on your side, I cannot do it.  Were my heart less wholly enlisted in this matter, my reason and sense of right would rebel.  Here, then, for the present at least, we must say farewell.”  And so, with many a heart-ache and many a pang, he went away.

As true love always grows with passing time, so his increased with the days, and intensified by the cruel heat which was poured upon it.  He realized the torture to which, in a thousand ways, this darling of his heart had for a lifetime been subjected; and his tenderness and love—­in which was an element of indignation and pathos—­deepened with every fresh revelation of the passing hours.  When he came back to her he had few words to speak, and no airy grace of sentence or caress to bestow; he followed her about in a curious, shadow-like way, with such a strain on his heart as made him many a time lift his hand to it, as if to check physical pain.  For her, she was as one who had found a beloved master, able and willing to lighten all her burdens; a physician, whose slightest touch brought balm and healing to every aching wound.  And so these two when the time came, spite of the absence of friends who should have been there, spite of warnings and denunciations and evil prophecies, stood up and said to those who listened what their hearts had long before confessed, that they were one for time and eternity; then, hand in hand, went out into the world.

For the present it was a pleasant enough world to them.  Surrey had a lovely little place on the Hudson to which he would carry her, and pleased himself by fitting it up with every convenience and beauty that taste could devise and wealth supply.

How happy they were there!  To be sure, nobody came to see them, but then they wished to see nobody; so every one was well satisfied.  The delicious lovers’ life of two years before was renewed, but with how much richer and deeper delights and blissfulness!  They galloped on many a pleasant morning across miles and miles of country, down rocky slopes, and through wild and romantic glens.  They drove lazily, on summer noons, through leafy fastnesses and cool forest paths; or sat idly by some little stream on the fresh, green moss, with a line dancing on the crystal water, amusing themselves by the fiction that it was fishing upon which they were intent, and not the dear delight of watching one another’s faces reflected from the placid stream.  They spent hours at home, reading bits of poems, or singing scraps of love-songs, talking a little, and then falling away into silence; or she sat perched on his knee or the elbow of his chair, smoothing his sunny hair, stroking his long, silky mustache, or looking into his answering eyes, till the world lapsed quite away from them, and they thought themselves in heaven.