ion of her spirit, its shadow almost continuously seated on her
brow. Her eyes tell of mental anguish, which, affecting her heart, is
also making inroad on her health. Already the roses have gone out of
her cheeks, leaving only lilies; the pale flowers foretelling an early
tomb.

The distressing symptoms do not escape the fond father's observation.
Indeed he knows all about them, now knowing their cause. Only through
the Natchez newspapers was he first made aware of that secret
correspondence between his daughter and Clancy. But since she has
confessed all--how her heart went with her words; is still true to what
she then said. The last an avowal not needed: her pallid cheeks
proclaiming it. The frank confession, instead of enraging her father,
but gives him regret, and along with it self-reproach. But for his
aristocratic pride, with some admixture of cupidity, he would have
permitted Clancy's addresses to his daughter. With an open honourable
courtship, the end might have been different--perhaps less disastrous.
It could not have been more.

He can now only hope, that time, the great soother of suffering hearts,
may bring balm to hers. New scenes in Texas, with thoughts arising
therefrom, may throw oblivion over the past. And perchance a new lover
may cause the lost one to be less painfully remembered. Several
aspirants have already presented themselves; more than one of the
younger members of the colony having accompanied it, with no view of
making fortunes by the cultivation of cotton, but solely to be beside
Helen Armstrong.

Her suitors one and all will be disappointed. She to whom they sue is
not an ordinary woman; nor her affections of the fickle kind. Like the
eagle's mate, deprived of her proud lord, she will live all her after
life in lone solitude--or die. She has lost her lover, or thinks so,
believing Clancy dead; but the love still burns within her bosom, and
will, so long as her life may last. Colonel Armstrong soon begins to
see this, and despairs of the roses ever again returning to the cheeks
of his elder daughter.

It would, no doubt, be different were the blighted heart that of his
younger. With her the Spanish proverb, "_un clavo saca otro clavo_,"
might have meaning. By good fortune, Jessie needs no nail to drive out
another. Her natural exuberance of spirits grown to greater joy from
the hopes that now halo her young life, is flung over the future of all.
Some compensation