the Count Choynowski was engrossed by the fair Helen;
and we saw with some anxiety that she in her turn was but too sensible
of his attentions, and that everything belonging to his country assumed
in her eyes an absorbing importance. She sent to London for all the
books that could be obtained respecting Poland; ordered all the journals
that interested themselves in that interesting though apparently
hopeless cause; turned liberal,--she who had been reared in the lap
of conservatism, and whom my father used laughingly to call the little
Tory;--turned Radical, turned Republican,--for she far out-soared the
moderate doctrines of whiggism in her political flights; denounced
the Emperor Nicholas as a tyrant; spoke of the Russians as a nation of
savages; and in spite of the evident uneasiness with which the Polish
exile listened to any allusion to the wrongs of his country, for he
never mingled in such discussions, omitted no opportunity of proving her
sympathy by declaiming with an animation and vehemence, as becoming
as anything so like scolding well could be, against the cruelty and
wickedness of the oppressors of that most unfortunate of nations.

It was clear that the peace of both was endangered, perhaps gone; and
that it had become the painful duty of friendship to awaken them from
their too bewitching dream.

We had made an excursion, on one sunny summer's day, as far as the
Everley Hills. Helen, always impassioned, had been wrought into a
passionate recollection of her own native country, by the sight of the
heather just bursting into its purple bloom; and M. Choynowski, usually
so self-possessed, had been betrayed into the expression of a kindred
feeling by the delicious odour of the fir plantations, which served to
transport him in imagination to the balm-breathing forests of the North.
This sympathy was a new, and a strong bond of union between two spirits
but too congenial; and I determined no longer to defer informing the
gentleman, in whose honour I placed the most implicit reliance, of the
peculiar position of our fair friend.

Detaining him, therefore, to coffee, (we had taken an early dinner in
the fir grove,) and suffering Helen to go home to her little boy,
I contrived, by leading the conversation to capricious wills, to
communicate to him, as if accidentally, the fact of her forfeiting her
whole income in the event of a second marriage.--He listened with grave
attention.

"Is she also deprived," inqui