You sometimes think that
you would like to marry Madge and Jenny both, if the thing were
possible, for Nat says they sometimes do so the other side of the ocean,
though he has never seen it himself.
----Ah, Clarence, you will have no such weakness as you grow older; you
will find that Providence has charitably so tempered our affections,
that every man of only ordinary nerve will be amply satisfied with a
single wife.
All this time--for you are making your visit a very long one, so that
autumn has come, and the nights are growing cool, and Jenny and yourself
are transferring your little coquetries to the chimney-corner--poor
Charlie lies sick at home. Boyhood, thank Heaven! does not suffer
severely from sympathy when the object is remote. And those letters from
the mother, telling you that Charlie cannot play,--cannot talk even as
he used to do,--and that perhaps his "Heavenly Father will take him away
to be with him in the better world," disturb you for a time only.
Sometimes however they come back to your thought on a wakeful night,
and you dream about his suffering, and think--why it is not you, but
Charlie, who is sick? The thought puzzles you; and well it may, for in
it lies the whole mystery of our fate.
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