e is about
to march against the enemy, and he must be master of my hand before he
takes the field. The troops are already preparing for the march. I hear
the drums beating. But one short hour is given me to prepare. Would I
were dead!

"There are times when the soul longs to quit her tenement; when the
brain sees visions; when the heart feels bursting; when a thousand
weapons seem ready for the hand, and a voice of temptation urges to acts
of woe.--Marston, Marston, where are you at this hour?"

The letter fell from my hands. I had the whole scene before my eyes. And
where was I, while the one to whom every affection of my nature was
indissolubly bound, this creature of beauty, fondness, and magnanimity,
was wasting her life in sorrow, in captivity, in the bitterness of the
broken heart? If I could not reproach myself with having increased her
calamities, yet had I assuaged them; had I flown to her rescue; had I
protected her against the cruelties of fortune; had I defied, sword in
hand, the heartless and arrogant villain who had brought her into such
hopeless peril? Those thoughts rushed through my brain in torture, and
it was some time before I could resume the reading of the blotted lines
upon my table. I dreaded their next announcement. I shrank from the pang
of certainty. The next sentence might announce to me that Clotilde had
been compelled by force to a detested marriage;--I dared not hazard the
knowledge.

Yet the recollection, that I was blameless in her trials, at length
calmed me. I felt, that to protect her had been wholly out of my power,
from the day when she left Valenciennes; and, while I honoured the
decision and loftiness of spirit which had led to that self-denying
step, I could lay nothing to my charge but the misfortune of being
unable to convince her mind of the wisdom of disdaining the opinion of
the world. I took up the letter again.

"Another day has passed, of terror and anguish unspeakable. Yet it has
closed in thanksgiving. I have been respited.--I was forced from my
chamber. I was forced to the altar. I was forced to endure the sight of
Montrecour at my side. A revolutionary priest stood prepared to perform
the hateful ceremony. I resisted, I protested, I wept in vain. The
chapel was thronged with revolutionary soldiers, who, regarding me as an
aristocrat, were probably incapable of feeling any sympathy with my
sufferings. I was hopeless. But, during the delay produced by my
determinat