s, and deepens into
an awe.

Both, then, looked on in silence, indulging it may be different
thoughts. At length, Lucilla said softly:--"Tell me, hast thou really no
faith in my father's creed? Are the stars quite dumb? Is there no truth
in their movements, no prophecy in their lustre?"

"My Lucilla, reason and experience tell us that the astrologers nurse a
dream that has no reality."

"Reason! well!--Experience!--why, did not thy father's mortal illness
hurry thee from home at the very time in which mine foretold thy
departure and its cause? I was then but a child; yet I shall never
forget the paleness of thy cheek when my father uttered his prediction."

"I, too, was almost a child then, Lucilla."

"But that prediction was verified?"

"It was so; but how many did Volktman utter that were never verified? In
true science there are no chances--no uncertainties."

"And my father," said Lucilla, unheeding the answer, "always foretold
that thy lot and mine were to be entwined."

"And the prophecy, perhaps, disposed you to the fact. You might never
have loved me, Lucilla, if your thoughts had not been driven to dwell
upon me by the prediction."

"Nay; I thought of thee before I heard the prophecy."

"But your father foretold me, dearest--cross and disappointment in my
love--was he not wrong? am I not blest with you?"

Lucilla threw herself into her lover's arms, and, as she kissed him,
murmured, "Ah, if I could make thee happy!" The next day Godolphin
departed for Rome. Lucilla was more dejected at his departure than
she had been even in his earliest absence. The winter was now slowly
approaching, and the weather was cold and dreary. That year it was
unusually rainy and tempestuous, and as the wild gusts howled around her
solitary home--how solitary now!--or she heard the big drops hurrying
down on the agitated lake, she shuddered at her own despondent thoughts,
and dreaded the gloom and loneliness of the lengthened night. For
the first time since she had lived with Godolphin she turned, but
disconsolately, to the company of books.

Works of all sorts filled their home, but the spell that once spoke to
her from the page was broken. If the book was not of love, it possessed
no interest;--if of love, she thought the description both tame and
false. No one ever painted love so as fully to satisfy another:--to some
it is too florid--to some too commonplace; the god, like other gods, has
no likeness on earth, and