rrated my power over your heart: I overrated still more, perhaps,
my power over my own."

"Ah, your own! I understand now. You did not love me?"

"I never said that I loved you in the sense in which you use the word.
I told you that the love which you have described in your verse, and
which," she added, falteringly, with heightened colour and with hands
tightly clasped, "I have conceived possible in my dreams, it was not
mine to give. You declared you were satisfied with such affection as
I could bestow. Hush! let me go on. You said that affection would
increase, would become love, in proportion as I knew you more. It has
not done so. Nay, it passed away; even before this time of trial and of
grief, I became aware how different from the love you professed was the
neglect which needs no excuse, for it did not pain me."

"You are cruel indeed, Mademoiselle."

"No, indeed, I am kind. I wish you to feel no pang at our parting. Truly
I had resolved, when the siege terminated, and the time to speak frankly
of our engagement came, to tell you that I shrank from the thought of
a union between us; and that it was for the happiness of both that our
promises should be mutually cancelled. The moment has come sooner than
I thought. Even had I loved you, Gustave, as deeply as--as well as
the beings of Romance love, I would not dare to wed one who calls upon
mortals to deny God, demolish His altars, treat His worship as a crime.
No; I would sooner die of a broken heart, that I might the sooner be one
of those souls privileged to pray the Divine Intercessor for merciful
light on those beloved and left dark on earth."

"Isaura!" exclaimed Gustave, his mobile temperament impressed, not by
the words of Isaura, but by the passionate earnestness with which they
were uttered, and by the exquisite spiritual beauty which her face
took from the combined sweetness and fervour of its devout
expression,--"Isaura, I merit your censure, your sentence of
condemnation; but do not ask me to give back your plighted troth. I have
not the strength to do so. More than ever, more than when first pledged
to me, I need the aid, the companionship, of my guardian angel. You
were that to me once; abandon me not now. In these terrible times of
revolution, excitable natures catch madness from each other. A writer in
the heat of his passion says much that he does not mean to be literally
taken, which in cooler moments he repents and retracts. Consider, too,
th