Oh, lad, if I could only die." He bent down over the window-sill, crushing his forehead on his hands.
"John," I said, in this depth of despair snatching at an equally desperate hope, "what if, instead of keeping this silence, you were to go to her and tell her all ?" "I have thought of that: a noble thought, worthy of a poor 'prentice lad! Why, two several evenings I have been insane enough to walk to Dr.Jessop's door, which I have never entered, and--mark you well! they have never asked me to enter since that night.

But each time ere I knocked my senses came back, and I went home--luckily having made myself neither a fool nor a knave." There was no answer to this either.

Alas! I knew as well as he did, that in the eye of the world's common sense, for a young man not twenty-one, a tradesman's apprentice, to ask the hand of a young gentlewoman, uncertain if she loved him, was most utter folly.

Also, for a penniless youth to sue a lady with a fortune, even though it was (the Brithwoods took care to publish the fact) smaller than was at first supposed--would, in the eye of the world's honour, be not very much unlike knavery.

There was no help--none! "David," I groaned, "I would you had never seen her." "Hush!--not a word like that.