he graceful, well-bred heiress
whom he admired, who commanded his profoundest respect, whom he had
known from his boyhood, and who of all others he had desired should
preside over his home and wear his name; but not the woman who reigned
in his heart; whose touch had lighted the glowing tenderness that so
transfigured his countenance, as she saw it that day, bending over a
sick convict in a penitentiary.

He offered her formal allegiance, and that pale phantom of affection
grounded in reverence, which is to the ardent love that a true woman
demands in exchange for her own, as--

"Moonlight unto sunlight; and as water unto wine."

She knew that he was no willing victim of a fascination, which had
audaciously deranged his carefully mapped campaign of life; that he
would have set his heel on his own insurgent heart, had it been
possible; and she honored him for the stern integrity that forbade his
affectation of a warmth of feeling which she was now conscious she had
never evoked.

Accepting the theory that the young convict was sustained and animated
by her devotion to a guilty lover, Leo fully understood that Lennox,
even were he mad enough to sacrifice his pride, could indulge no
expectation of ever winning the love of the prisoner; and despite her
efforts to regard their rupture as final, she had faintly hoped that he
would cross the ocean, and in person urge a renewal of the betrothal.
The test of absence had proved as effectual as she intended it should
be, and his letter proclaimed the humiliating fact, that while honor
inspired him to hold out his wrists for conjugal manacles, honor
equally constrained him to spare her the wrong and insult of insincere
professions of tenderness.

Had she found it possible to condemn him as unworthy, it would have
diminished the pain of surrendering the brightest hope of her life; for
contempt is the balm a lofty soul offers a bruised heart, but she was
just, even in her anguish; and that when barbed the arrow, was the
mortifying consciousness that compassion for her was the strongest
motive which dictated the carefully phrased letter. She was far too
proud to parley with the temptation to accept the shadow in lieu of the
substance; and twenty-four hours after the arrival of the final appeal,
her answer was speeding with wings of steam across the ocean.

"DEAR LENNOX:

"My heart overflows with gratitude for all the affectionate interest,
the kind solicitude, the innumerab