sadly, playing with the frail
autumn flowers that grow at her side. What can she be thinking? You ask
it by a look.

She smiles,--takes your hand, for she will not let you grow angry,--

"I was thinking, Clarence, whether this Laura Dalton would, after all,
make a good wife,--such an one as you would love always?"

VII.

_A Good Wife._

The thought of Nelly suggests new dreams that are little apt to find
place in the rhapsodies of a youthful lover. The very epithet of a good
wife mates tamely with the romantic fancies of a first passion. It is
measuring the ideal by too practical a standard. It sweeps away all the
delightful vagueness of a fairy dream of love, and reduces one to a dull
and economic estimate of actual qualities. Passion lives above all
analysis and estimate, and arrives at its conclusions by intuition.

Did Petrarch ever think if Laura would make a good wife; did Oswald ever
think it of Corinne? Nay, did even the more practical Waverley ever
think it of the impassioned Flora? Would it not weaken faith in their
romantic passages, if you believed it? What have such vulgar, practical
issues to do with that passion which sublimates the faculties, and makes
the loving dreamer to live in an ideal sphere where nothing but goodness
and brightness can come?

Nelly is to be pitied for entertaining such a thought; and yet Nelly is
very good and kind. Her affections are without doubt all centred in the
remnant of the shattered home; she has never known any further and
deeper love; never once fancied it even--

--Ah, Clarence, you are very young!

And yet there are some things that puzzle you in Nelly. You have found
accidentally, in one of her treasured books,--a book that lies almost
always on her dressing-table,--a little withered flower with its stem in
a slip of paper, and on the paper the initials of--your old friend
Frank. You recall, in connection with this, her indisposition to talk of
him on the first evening of your return. It seems--you scarce know
why--that these are the tokens of something very like a leaning of the
heart. It does occur to you that she too may have her little casket of
loves; and you try one day very adroitly to take a look into this
casket.

----You will learn later in life that the heart of a modest, gentle
girl is a very hard matter for even a brother to probe; it is at once
the most tender and the most unapproachable of all fastnesses. It admits
feeling by armi