Given a
certain amount of natural ability, and the industrious and indefatigable
young writer may speedily emerge from obscurity, and take his place in
the great army of those gallant soldiers whose only weapon is the pen.
Whatever good fortune had come to Valentine Hawkehurst he had worked for
with all honesty of purpose. The critics were not slow to remark that he
worked at a white-hot haste, and must needs be a shallow pretender
because he was laborious and indefatigable.
Before the beginning of Charlotte's slow decline he had fancied himself
the happiest of men. There were more deposit-receipts in his desk. The
nest-egg, about the hatching whereof there had been such cackling and
crowing some months ago, was now one of many eggs; for the hard-working
scribbler had no leisure in which to be extravagant, had he been so
minded. The purchase of a half-circlet of diamonds for his betrothed's
slim finger had been his only folly.
Charlotte had remonstrated with him on the impropriety of such an
extravagance, and had exacted from him a promise that this wild and
Monte-Christo-like course should be pursued no further; but she was very
proud of her half-hoop of diamonds nevertheless, and was wont to press it
tenderly to her lips before she laid it aside for the night.
"There must be no more such extravagance, sir," she said to her lover,
when he sat by her side twisting the ring round and round on her pretty
finger.
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