her romance; her brightest visions of
grace and loveliness and genius seemed personified in this form; the
form of one to whom she was bound by the strongest of all earthly
ties, of one on whose heart she had a claim second only to that of the
being by whose lips his name was never mentioned. Was he, then, no
more? Ah! could she doubt that bitterest calamity? Ah! was it, was
it any longer a marvel, that one who had lived in the light of those
seraphic eyes, and had watched them until their terrestrial splendour
had been for ever extinguished, should shrink from the converse that
could remind her of the catastrophe of all her earthly hopes! This
chamber, then, was the temple of her mother's woe, the tomb of her
baffled affections and bleeding heart. No wonder that Lady Annabel,
the desolate Lady Annabel, that almost the same spring must have
witnessed the most favoured and the most disconsolate of women, should
have fled from the world that had awarded her at the same time a lot
so dazzling and so full of despair. Venetia felt that the existence
of her mother's child, her own fragile being, could have been that
mother's sole link to life. The heart of the young widow of Marmion
Herbert must have broken but for Venetia; and the consciousness of
that remaining tie, and the duties that it involved, could alone have
sustained the victim under a lot of such unparalleled bitterness. The
tears streamed down her cheek as she thought of her mother's misery,
and her mother's gentle love; the misery that she had been so cautious
her child should never share; the vigilant affection that, with all
her own hopes blighted, had still laboured to compensate to her
child for a deprivation the fulness of which Venetia could only now
comprehend.

When, where, why did he die? Oh that she might talk of him to her
mother for ever! It seemed that life might pass away in listening to
his praises. Marmion Herbert! and who was Marmion Herbert? Young as he
was, command and genius, the pride of noble passions, all the glory of
a creative mind, seemed stamped upon his brow. With all his marvellous
beauty, he seemed a being born for greatness. Dead! in the very burst
of his spring, a spring so sweet and splendid; could he be dead? Why,
then, was he ever born? It seemed to her that he could not be dead;
there was an animated look about the form, that seemed as if it could
not die without leaving mankind a prodigal legacy of fame.

Venetia turned and