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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: events of life combining to ruin or to save him? This young
girl, whom he so passionately loved, was she to be thrust back
into his arms, and was he to be told to clasp her and be
silent? And that by Hope, and in the name of duty?
It seemed a strange position, even for him who was so eager for
fresh experiences and difficult combinations. At Hope's appeal
he was to risk Hope's peace forever; he was to make her sweet
sisterly affection its own executioner. In obedience to her
love he must revive Emilia's. The tender intercourse which he
had been trying to renounce as a crime must be rebaptized as a
duty. Was ever a man placed, he thought, in a position so
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