her, and it saw a clustering of gray hairs on her mother's brow,
where all had been raven black when Luise departed for Seville. Poor
Luise! The sorrows of her young heart were enlarged. Time had not been
absent with the pensive absentee.

True, he had stolen no charm from her little playmates. Carlos was a
brighter boy than ever; and as for that merry Zingara-like Isabel, and
the yet merrier Manuel--they were not a whit changed, unless for the
better, in look, and manner, and love. Still the too-sensitive Luise was
hurt at the thought that they could not always be children--that Time
was bent on effacing her earliest and dearest impressions, removing from
her home that ideal of family relationship to which all her affections
clung with passionate entreaty. Whatever the future might; have to
reveal of enjoyment and endearment, the past could never be lived over
again; the past could never be identified with things present and things
to come; and it was to the past that her heart was betrothed--a past
that had gone the way of all living, and left her as it were widowed and
not to be comforted.

"And now I will tell you my dream," said poor foolish Luise; "and you
will see why I looked happy in sleeping, and sorry in waking. I thought
I was sitting here in the garden--crying over what I have been telling
you--and suddenly an angel stood before me, and bade me weep not.
Strange as was his form, and sunny in its exceeding brightness, I was
not frightened; for his words were very, very gentle, and his look too
full of kindness to give me one thrill of alarm. And he said that what I
had longed for so much should be granted; that my father and mother
should _not_ grow old, nor Carlos cease to be the boy he now is, nor
Isabel grow up into a sedate woman, nor Manuel lose the gay childishness
for which we all pet him, nor I feel myself forsaking the old familiar
past, and launching into dim troublous seas of perpetual change. He
promised that we should one and all be freed from the great law of time;
and that as we are this day parents and children, so we should continue
forever--while vicissitude and decay must still have sway in the great
world at large. Can you wonder that I smiled? Or that it pained me when
I awoke, and found that the bright angel and the sweet promise were
only--a dream?"...

There was no lack of conversation that evening in that Lisbon cottage.
All loved Luise; and she, in the midst of so many artless to