fection between natures like those of Percival and
Helen, favoured by free and constant intercourse, was naturally rapid.
It was scarcely five weeks from the day he had first seen Helen, and he
already regarded her as his plighted bride. During the earlier days of
his courtship, Percival, enamoured and absorbed for the first time
in his life, did not hasten to make his mother the confidante of his
happiness. He had written but twice; and though he said briefly, in the
second letter, that he had discovered two relations, both interesting
and one charming, he had deferred naming them or entering into
detail. This not alone from that indescribable coyness which all have
experienced in addressing even those with whom they are most intimate,
in the early, half-unrevealed, and mystic emotions of first love, but
because Lady Diary's letters had been so full of her sister's declining
health, of her own anxieties and fears, that he had shrunk from giving
her a new subject of anxiety; and a confidence full of hope and joy
seemed to him unfeeling and unseasonable. He knew how necessarily uneasy
and restless an avowal that his heart was seriously engaged to one she
had never seen, would make that tender mother, and that his confession
would rather add to her cares than produce sympathy with his transports.
But now, feeling impatient for his mother's assent to the formal
proposals which had become due to Madame Dalibard and Helen, and taking
advantage of the letter last received from her, which gave more cheering
accounts of her sister, and expressed curiosity for further explanation
as to his half disclosure, he wrote at length, and cleared his breast of
all its secrets. It was the same day in which he wrote this confession
and pleaded his cause that we accompany him to the house of his sweet
mistress, and leave him by her side, in the accustomed garden. Within,
Madame Dalibard, whose chair was set by the window, bent over certain
letters, which she took, one by one, from her desk and read slowly,
lifting her eyes from time to time and glancing towards the young people
as they walked, hand in hand, round the small demesnes, now hid by the
fading foliage, now emerging into view. Those letters were the early
love-epistles of William Mainwaring. She had not recurred to them for
years. Perhaps she now felt that food necessary to the sustainment of
her fiendish designs. It was a strange spectacle to see this being, so
full of vital energy