men have all our faults, heightened by a falsehood and inconsistency peculiarly their own. You may make a man understand his real interests; now, a woman you never can. Of all materials with which it may be my evil fate to work, I especially abjure and abhor the fanciful."
"Really, my dear uncle, you make me very uncomfortable," exclaimed Courtenaye, laughing. "Do you not even believe in love."
"Yes," was the reply,—"as I do in the hooping-cough, or the measles; as a sort of juvenile disease to be got over as soon as possible. If young people would but consider,—a thing which young people never do,—they would find that love is its own cure. Gratified, it dies of satiety; ungratified, of forgetfulness. Let any man, in the course of a few years, look back upon the most desperate passion he ever experienced, and he will find himself not only cured, but ashamed of it."
Norbourne walked on in silence: he felt too keenly to like to speak of his feelings. He shrank from mentioning his engagement to
