ayish skies
and sighing winds that swept the leaves along the dark walks and moaned
sadly among the tall beech-trees. The still, calm waters of the little
lake, that reflected the bright foliage and the deep blue sky motionless
as in a mirror, was now ruffled by the passing breeze, and surged with a
low, sad sound against its rocky sides; and as I watched these changes,
I sorrowed less for the departing season than that every trace of her
I loved was fading from before me. The bare and skeleton branches now
threw their gaunt shadows where I had seen her walk at noonday enveloped
in deep shade. Dark, watery clouds were hurrying across the surface of
the stream where I had seen her fair form mirrored. The cold winds
of coming winter swept along the princely terrace where not a zephyr
rustled her dress as she moved. And somehow, I could not help connecting
these changes with my own sensations, and feeling that a gloomy winter
was approaching to my own most cherished hopes.

Months passed over with me thus, in which, save on my round of duty,
I never spoke to any one. D'Ervan did not return as he promised,--a
circumstance which, with all my solitude, I sincerely rejoiced at. And
of De Beauvais I heard nothing; and yet, on one account, I could have
wished much to learn where he was. Unhappily, in the excitement of
the morning I last saw him, he forgot on the table at my quarters the
commission of colonel by which he had endeavored to tempt my ambition,
and which I never noticed till several hours after his departure.
Unwilling to destroy, and yet fearful of retaining it in my possession,
I knew not well what to do, and had locked it up in my writing-desk,
anxiously looking for an opportunity to forward it to him. None such,
however, presented itself, nor did I ever hear from him from the hour he
left me.

The unbroken solitude in which I lived disposed me to study, and
I resumed the course which in earlier days had afforded me so much
interest and amusement; and by this, not only was my mind drawn off from
the contemplation of the painful circumstances of my own loneliness, but
gradually my former ardor for military distinction came back in all its
force. And thus did I learn, for the first time, how many of the griefs
that our brains beget find their remedies in the source they spring
from,--the exercise of the intellect being like that of the body, an
essential to a healthy state of thinking and feeling. Each day imparted