lescence of my uncle gave me a just excuse to discontinue our
rides. What time Trevanion spared me, it was natural that I should spend
with my family. I went to no balls nor parties; I even absented myself
from Trevanion's periodical dinners. Miss Trevanion at first rallied me
on my seclusion, with her usual lively malice. But I continued worthily
to complete my martyrdom. I took care that no reproachful look at the
gayety that wrung my soul should betray my secret. Then Fanny seemed
either hurt or disdainful, and avoided altogether entering her father's
study; all at once, she changed her tactics, and was seized with a
strange desire for knowledge, which brought her into the room to look
for a book, or ask a question, ten times a day. I was proof to all.
But, to speak truth, I was profoundly wretched. Looking back now, I
am dismayed at the remembrance of my own sufferings: my health became
seriously affected; I dreaded alike the trial of the day and the anguish
of the night. My only distractions were in my visits to Vivian and my
escape to the dear circle of home. And that home was my safeguard and
preservative in that crisis of my life; its atmosphere of unpretended
honor and serene virtue strengthened all my resolutions; it braced me
for my struggles against the strongest passion which youth admits, and
counteracted the evil vapors of that air in which Vivian's envenomed
spirit breathed and moved. Without the influence of such a home, if
I had succeeded in the conduct that probity enjoined towards those in
whose house I was a trusted guest, I do not think I could have resisted
the contagion of that malign and morbid bitterness against fate and
the world which love, thwarted by fortune, is too inclined of itself
to conceive, and in the expression of which Vivian was not without the
eloquence that belongs to earnestness, whether in truth or falsehood.
But, somehow or other, I never left the little room that contained the
grand suffering in the face of the veteran soldier, whose lip, often
quivering with anguish, was never heard to murmur, and the tranquil
wisdom which had succeeded my father's early trials (trials like my
own), and the loving smile on my mother's tender face, and the innocent
childhood of Blanche (by which name the Elf had familiarized herself to
us), whom I already loved as a sister,--without feeling that those four
walls contained enough to sweeten the world, had it been filled to its
capacious brim wi