appointed. He followed, too, the advice of the friendly priest,
in leaving the public belief of his own death uncontradicted; and, as he
had not actually witnessed the murder in the grove near D., he felt
himself justified in withholding his evidence against an individual, of
whose innocence there was a remote possibility.

The mental agony of the unfortunate young headsman had been so acute,
that a reaction upon his bodily health was inevitable. Symptoms of
serious indisposition appeared the next day, and were followed by a long
and critical malady, which, however, eventually increased his domestic
happiness, by unfolding in his Madelon nobler and higher attributes than
he had yet discovered in her character. No longer the giddy and
laughter-loving Frenchwoman, she had, for some years, become a devoted
wife and mother; but it was not until she saw her husband's gentle
spirit for ever blighted, and his life endangered for some weeks by a
wasting fever, that she felt all his claims upon her, and bitterly
reproached herself as the sole cause of his heaviest calamities. During
this long period of sickness, when all worldly objects were waning
around this man of sorrows, she watched, and wept, and prayed over him
with an untiring assiduity and self-oblivion, which developed to the
grateful Florian all the unfathomable depths of woman's love, and proved
her consummate skill and patience in all the tender offices and trying
duties of a sick-chamber. Her health was undermined, and her fine eyes
were dimmed for ever by long-continued vigilance; but her assiduities
were at length rewarded by a favourable crisis; and when the patient
sufferer was sufficiently restored to bear the disclosure, she kneeled
to him in deep humility, and acknowledged, what the reader has doubtless
long conjectured, that _she_ had, from an upper window, caused that
ominous jarring of the sword and axe which induced her father to suspect
and follow him, and which eventually led to their marriage.

Florian started in sudden indignation; but his gentle nature, and the
hallowed influences of recent sickness and calamity, soon prevailed over
his wrath. What _could_ he say? How could he chide the lovely and
devoted woman, whose fraud had grown out of her affection for him! In an
instant he forgot his own sorrows; and, as he listened to the mournful
and beseeching accents of her who was the mother of his children, and
had been unto him, in sickness and in hea