nner."

Strange to say, however, that Mr. Sinclair and his wife both repudiated
the idea of her attachment to Osborne, and insisted that Agnes'
suspicion was rash and groundless.

It was impossible, they said, that such an attachment could exist;
Jane and Osborne had seen too little of each other, and were both of
a disposition too shy and diffident to rush so precipitately into a
passion that is usually the result of far riper years than either of
them had yet reached.

Mr. Sinclair admitted that Jane was a girl full of affection, and likely
to be extremely susceptible, yet it was absurd, he added, to suppose for
a moment, that she would suffer them to be engaged, or her peace of mind
disturbed, by a foolish regard for a smooth-faced boy, and she herself
not much beyond sixteen.

There is scarcely to be found, in the whole range of human life
and character, any observation more true, and at the same time more
difficult to be understood, than the singular infatuation of parents
who have survived their own passions,--whenever the prudence of their
children happens to be called in question.

We know not whether such a fact be necessary to the economy of life, and
the free breathings of youthful liberty, but this at least is clear to
any one capable of noting down its ordinary occurrences, that no matter
how acutely and vividly parents themselves may have felt the passion of
love when young, they appear as ignorant of the symptoms that mark its
stages in the lives of their children, as if all memory of its existence
had been obliterated out of their being. Perhaps this may be wisely
designed, and no doubt it is, but, alas! its truth is a melancholy
comment upon the fleeting character of the only passion that charms
our early life, and fills the soul with sensations too ethereal to be
retained by a heart which grosser associations have brought beneath the
standard of purity necessary for their existence in it.

Jane, as she bent her way to the place of appointment, felt like one
gradually emerging out of darkness into light. The scene at dinner
had quickened her moral sense, which, as the reader already knows, was
previous to that perhaps morbidly acute. Every step, however, towards
the idol of her young devotion, removed the memory of what had occurred
at home, and collected around her heart all the joys and terrors that in
maidenly diffidence characterize the interview she was about to give her
lover. Oh how little