A Struggle for a Ring — page 44: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“40 SAVING A WOMAN'S HONOR. at him, she wondered if he would ever love her as she loved him. She forgot her parents.and the doctor; to her their journey from Ladywell to London was like going from one world to another. Believing she slept, Lord Carsdale allowed himself to Ao what he had not done before—that is, think ; not that any amount of thought could change his fixed purpose. There is a state of mind that the French call exa//ee—it expressed his; he was exalted far above all common sense, all pru- dence. He said to himself that the honor of a woman was concerned, and when such was the case, a man must think of nothing else save that woman. He forgot, in these heroic notions, all that he owed to his parents, his rank, and position; he did not stop to think how much he owed society or home; he imagined himself a hero going to do a great action. : ‘‘'There are men,” he thought to himself, ‘‘ who would have flung away such a heart as this, who would have gone off, only too pleased to free themselves from blame, with- out caring what the woman they had led into the error had to suffer for it; men who would have boasted of the conquest, and numbered it among the light flirtations of a light life.” Not so a Carsdale—they were real gentlemen, all of them. To tell the truth of our hero, he thought more of himself than he did of Alice; he was not in love with her, but he was certainly in love with his own actions, in love with his own magnificent sense of honor, with his own nobility of character. He would not listen to the sug- _ gestions of prudence or common sense; if any idea ad- verse to his present plans occurred to him, he thrust it away angrily. | ‘“‘T am doing my duty,” he said, haughtily; ‘‘I am Si. ~ comicbhoo m