A short time afterwards he
introduced me to a photograph of my predestined, who has a pretty, but an
extremely inanimate, face. After this his health failed rapidly. One
night I was sitting, as I habitually sat for hours, in his dimly-lighted
room, near his bed, to which he had been confined for a week. He had not
spoken for some time, and I supposed he was asleep; but happening to look
at him I saw his eyes wide open, and fixed on me strangely. He was
smiling benignantly, intensely, and in a moment he beckoned to me. Then,
on my going to him--'I feel that I shall not last long,' he said; 'but I
am willing to die when I think how comfortably I have arranged your
future.' He was talking of death, and anything but grief at that moment
was doubtless impious and monstrous; but there came into my heart for the
first time a throbbing sense of being over-governed. I said nothing, and
he thought my silence was all sorrow. 'I shall not live to see you
married,' he went on, 'but since the foundation is laid, that little
signifies; it would be a selfish pleasure, and I have never thought of
myself but in you. To foresee your future, in its main outline, to know
to a certainty that you will be safely domiciled here, with a wife
approved by my judgment, cultivating the moral fruit of which I have sown
the seed--this will content me.
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