cheeks as she put her arms round his neck, and
whispered:

"Why ask? Are you not all the world to me? I should love you little if I
condemned you for any errors of your past. I know your warm and noble
heart, and I trust to it without a fear. There is no doubt between us
now!"

Oh, my prudent and conventional young ladies, standing ready to accuse
my poor little Nina, are you any wiser in your generation? You who have
had all nature taken out of you by "finishing," whose heads are crammed
with "society's" laws, and whose affections are measured out by rule,
who would have been cold, and dignified, and read Ernest a severe
lesson, and sent him back hopeless and hardened to go ten times worse
than he had gone before--believe me, that impulse points truer than "the
world," and that the dictates of the heart are better than the
regulations of society. Take my word for it, that love will do more for
a man than lectures; and faith in him be more likely to keep him
straight than all your moralising; and before you judge him severely for
having drunk a little too deep of the Sillery of life, remember that his
temptations are not your temptations, nor his ways your ways, and be
gentle to dangers which society and custom keep out of your own path.
The stern thorn crows you offer to us when we are inclined to ask your
absolution, are not the right means to win us from the rose wreaths of
our bacchanalia.

Nina, as you see, loved her _Lion_ too well to remember dignity, or
take her stand on principle; and gallantly did the young lady stand the
bombardment from all sides that sought to break her resolutions and
crush her "misplaced affections." Gordon chanced to come in that day and
light upon Ernest, and the fury into which he worked himself ill
beseemed so respectable a pharisee. Vaughan kept tranquilly haughty, and
told the banker, calmly, that he "thanked God he had his daughter's
love, and his money he would never have stooped to accept." Gordon
forbade him the house, and carried Nina back to England; but before she
went they had a parting interview, in which Ernest offered to leave her
free. But such freedom would have been worse than death to Nina, and,
before they separated, she told him that in three months more she should
be of age, and then, come what might, she would be his if he would take
her without wealth. Take her he would have done from the arms of Satanus
himself, but to disentangle himself from all his diffic