The Heart's Highway by Mary E. Wilkins — Read

It was dawn before we were abed, but I for one had no sleep, being strained to such a pitch of rapture and pain by what I had discovered. The will I had not, to take the joy which I seemed to see before me like some brimming cup of the gods, but not yet, in the first surprise of knowing it offered me, the will to avoid the looking upon it, and the tasting of it in dreams. Over and over I said to myself, and every time with a new strengthening of resolution, that Mary Cavendish should not love me, and that in some way I would force her to obey me in that as in other things, never doubting that I could do so. Well I knew that she could not wed a convict, nor could I clear myself unless at the expense of her sister Catherine, and sure I was that she would not purchase love itself at such a cost as that. There remained nothing but to turn her fancy from me, and that seemed to me an easy task, she being but a child, and having, I reasoned, but little more than a childish first love for me, which, as every one knows, doth readily burn itself out by its excess of wick, and lack of substantial fuel. And yet, as I lay on my bed with the red dawn at the windows, and the birds calling outside, and the scent of the opening blossoms entering invisible, such pangs of joy and ecstasy beyond anything which I had ever known on earth overwhelmed me that I could not resist them.

Knowing well that in the end I should prove my strength, for the time I gave myself to that advance of man before the spur of love, which I doubt not is after the same fashion as the unfolding of the flowers in the spring, and the nesting of the birds, and the movement of the world itself from season to season, and would be as uncontrollable were it not that a man is mightier even than that to which he owes his own existence, and hath the power of putting that which he loves before his own desire of it. But for the time, knowing well that I could at any time take up the reins to the bridling of myself, I let them hang loose, and over and over I whispered what Mary Cavendish had said, and over and over I felt that touch of delicate tenderness on my arm, and I built up such great castles that they touched the farthest skies of my fancy, and all the time braving the knowledge that I should myself dash them into ruins.