"Will that encourage you to advise me like a friend?" she said.

"Alas! no," sighed Milburn fervently, "it makes me the more your unjust lover. I cannot advise you away from me. Oh, let me plead for myself. I love you!"

"Then what shall I do," exclaimed Vesta, in low tones, "if you are unable to rise to the height of my friend, and my father is your slave? Do you think God can bless your prosperity, when you are so hard with your debtor? On me the full sacrifice falls, though I never was in your debt consciously, and I have never to my remembrance wished injury to any one."

"Would you accept your father's independence at the expense of the most despised man in Princess Anne?" Milburn spoke without changing his kind tone. "Would you let me give him the fruit of many years of hard toil and careful saving, in order that I shall be disappointed in the only motive of assisting him - the honorable wooing of his daughter?"

She felt her pride rising.

"Your father's debts to me are tens of thousands of dollars," continued Milburn. "Do you ask me to present that sum to you, and retire to my loneliness out of this bright light of home and family, warmth and music, that you have made? That is the test you put my love to: banishment from you. Will you ask it?"

"I have not asked for your money, sir," said Vesta. "Yet I have heard of Love doing as much as that, relieving the anguish of its object, and finding sufficient joy in the self-denying deed."

"I do not think you personally know of any such case, though you may have read it in a novel or tract. Men have died, and left a fortune they could no longer keep, to some cherished lady; or they have made a considerable sacrifice for a beautiful and noble woman; but where did you ever hear, Miss Vesta, of a famished lover, surrendering every endowment that might win the peerless one, to be himself returned to his sorrow, tortured still by love, and by his neighbors ridiculed? What would Princess Anne say of me? That I had been made a fool of, and hurl new epithets after my hat?"

Vesta searched her mind, thinking she must alight upon some such example there, but none suited the case. Meshach took advantage of her silence:

"The gifts of a lover are everywhere steps to love, as I have understood. He makes his impression with them; they are expected. Nothing creates happiness like a gift, and it is an old saying that blessings await him who gives, and also her who takes, and that to seek and ask and knock are praiseworthy."

"Oh," said Vesta, "but to be bought, Mr. Milburn? To be weighed against a father's debts - is it not degrading?"