"I always used to think that to live in this neighbourhood would be
paradise," murmured Maria, looking sentimentally but vacantly into a
box of seedling balsams.
"I'm very glad you like it," said I. I could not make pretty speeches.
An unpleasant conviction was stealing over my mind that I had been a
fool, and had no one but myself to blame. I began to think that Maria
would not have died of consumption even if I had not proposed to her,
and to doubt if I were really so heartbroken as I had fancied. (Indeed
the society of my cousin, who was a lady, had by this time gone far to
cure me of my sentiment for one who was not, and who had been
sensible enough to marry a man in her own rank of life, to my father's
great relief, and, as I then thought, to my life-long disappointment.)
The whole affair seemed a mockery, and I wished it were a dream. It
was not thus that my father had plighted his troth to my fair mother.
This was not the sort of affection that had made happy the short lives
of Leo's parents. The lemon-scented verbena which I was pounding
between my fingers bitterly recalled a little sketch of the monument
to their memory which Leo had shown me in his Bible, where he had also
pressed a sprig of verbena.
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