er. She was to be tall; her eyes were to be
dark, and their long fringing lashes were to sweep her cheek;
her throat was to be white and graceful as a swan's; genius
was to give light to her eyes, and eloquence to her words; and
you, sister, _you_, on my marriage-day, were to have placed
the blossoms of orange flower in the dark hair of my bride.
You remember it, don't you? Well, my bride is fair, very fair;
but not like the bride we had imagined--or rather that we had
foreseen; for, sister, we have seen her, have we not--walking
in beauty by our sides? Have we not gazed upon her till we
have fancied her a thing too bright, too lovely, for the earth
she treads upon? My bride was not kissed by you; she stood by
my side, and you were not there to say, 'God bless her!' She
put her cold hand into mine, and looked steadily into my face;
there was no colour in her cheek; no emotion in her voice. It
was all as calm as the life that lies before me. Mary, you had
better write and wish me joy; and tell Ellen to wish me joy
too; but do not show my letter to your husband; it is not calm
enough for his inspection.

"Yours, dear Mary, ever yours,

"Henry Lovell."

There was something inexpressibly painful to me in the tone of
this letter; it seemed the sequel of one part of my last
conversation with Henry; a pure and innocent existence, he had
said, must be sacrificed, and doomed to hopeless
disappointment, if I persisted in my refusal. I had persisted,
and Alice was sacrificed, though to what I knew not; but to
some mysterious necessity--to some secret obligation. A
loveless marriage--a lonely passage through life--and God only
knew what secret trials--what withering of the heart--what
solitude of the soul--what measure of that hope deferred,
which makes the heart sick--of that craving void which nothing
fills, were to be hers, who had grown up and blossomed like
the rose in the wilderness, and who had been, like her own
poor flower, too rudely transplanted, doomed perhaps like it,
to wither and to die. It was strange, that, never having seen
Alice but once, I should have felt such a deep and complete
conviction of her goodness and purity, of the angelic nature
of the spirit which was shrouded in that fair form, that as
the idea of guilt in her intercourse with Henry, so now, that
of worldliness, of ambition, or of indelicacy, in having made
this secret marriage, never presented itself to my mind.
Perhaps it might yet turn