"What can you be thinking of this miserable girl?" says she.

"What I am trying to tell you all this while!" said I, "that you

had best leave me alone, whom you can make no more unhappy if you

tried, and turn your attention to James More, your father, with

whom you are like to have a queer pirn to wind."

"O, that I must be going out into the world alone with such a man!"

she cried, and seemed to catch herself in with a great effort.

"But trouble yourself no more for that," said she. "He does not

know what kind of nature is in my heart. He will pay me dear for

this day of it; dear, dear, will he pay."

She turned, and began to go home and I to accompany her. At which

she stopped.

"I will be going alone," she said. "It is alone I must be seeing

him."

Some little time I raged about the streets, and told myself I was

the worst used lad in Christendom. Anger choked me; it was all

very well for me to breathe deep; it seemed there was not air

enough about Leyden to supply me, and I thought I would have burst

like a man at the bottom of the sea. I stopped and laughed at

myself at a street corner a minute together, laughing out loud, so

that a passenger looked at me, which brought me to myself.

"Well," I thought, "I have been a gull and a ninny and a soft Tommy

long enough. Time it was done. Here is a good lesson to have

nothing to do with that accursed sex, that was the ruin of the man

in the beginning and will be so to the end. God knows I was happy

enough before ever I saw her; God knows I can be happy enough again

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