in the present case,
the catastrophe is known to me, and all speculation on the future
denied. Poor Eugenie, how I felt for all your sorrows!--wondrous
spectacle of a heart that could transmute its one absorbing passion into
another, and from love, the fondest and most confiding, beget a pure and
disinterested friendship!

At last the book glided unnoticed from my hand, and I slept. The sofa
where I lay stood in a part of the room where a deep shadow fell from
the closed _jalousies_ of a window, so that any person might easily have
entered or traversed the apartment without noticing me. I slept calmly
and without a stir--my dreaming thoughts full of that poor girl's love.
How little does any first passion depend upon the excellence of the
object that creates it! How ideal, purely ideal, are those first
emotions of the heart! I knew something of this, too; for, when
young--very young, and very impressionable, with a strong dash of
romance in my nature, that lent its Claude Lorraine tint to all I looked
at, I fell in love. Never was the phrase more fitting. It was no gradual
or even imperceptible declension, but a headlong, reckless plunge; such
as some confident and hardy swimmer, or very often a bold bather, makes
into the water, that all may be quickly over.

I had been appointed _attache_ at Vienna, where Lord Newington was then
ambassador--a widower with an only daughter. I was very young, fresh
from Woolwich, where I had been studying for the Artillery service, when
the death of a distant relative, who but a year before had refused to
see me, put me in possession of a very large fortune. My guardian, Lord
Elderton, an old _diplomate_, at once removed me from Woolwich, and,
after a short sojourn at his house near Windsor, I was introduced into
what Foreign-office people technically denominate "The Line," and what
they stoutly uphold as the only career for a gentleman.

I must some day or other jot down a few recollections of my life at
Gortham, Lord Elderton's seat, where, with Grotius and Puffendorf of a
morning, and old Sir Robert Adams and Lord Hailiebury of an evening, I
was believed to be inhaling the very atmosphere of learned diplomacy.
Tiresome old gentlemen, whose thoughts stood fast at the time of Fox and
Pitt, and, like a clock that went down in the night, steadily pointed to
an hour long bygone. How wearied I was of discussions as to whether the
King of Prussia would declare war, or the Emperor of Austr