abbath eve when he wept upon her bosom,
appeared suddenly to come upon a nature so calm and stately, and without
a visible cause; when she recalled all these symptoms of a heart not
now at rest, it was not possible for her to reject altogether a certain
vague and dreary apprehension. Nor did she herself, although to Ellinor
she so affected, ascribe this cloudiness and caprice of mood merely to
the result of a solitary and meditative life; she attributed them to the
influence of an early grief, perhaps linked with the affections, and did
not doubt but that one day or another she should learn its secret.
As for remorse--the memory of any former sin--a life so austerely
blameless, a disposition so prompt to the activity of good, and so
enamoured of its beauty--a mind so cultivated, a temper so gentle, and
a heart so easily moved--all would have forbidden, to natures far more
suspicious than Madeline's, the conception of such a thought. And so,
with a patient gladness, though not without some mixture of anxiety, she
suffered herself to glide onward to a future, which, come cloud, come
shine, was, she believed at least, to be shared with him.

On looking over the various papers from which I have woven this tale, I
find a letter from Madeline to Aram, dated at this time. The characters,
traced in the delicate and fair Italian hand coveted at that period, are
fading, and, in one part, wholly obliterated by time; but there seems to
me so much of what is genuine in the heart's beautiful romance in
this effusion, that I will lay it before the reader without adding or
altering a word.

"Thank you, thank you, dearest Eugene! I have received, then, the first
letter you ever wrote me. I cannot tell you how strange it seemed to me,
and how agitated I felt on seeing it, more so, I think, than if it
had been yourself who had returned. However, when the first delight of
reading it faded away, I found that it had not made me so happy as it
ought to have done--as I thought at first it had done. You seem sad and
melancholy; a certain nameless gloom appears to me to hang over your
whole letter. It affects my spirits--why I know not--and my tears
fall even while I read the assurances of your unaltered, unalterable
love--and yet this assurance your Madeline--vain girl!--never for a
moment disbelieves. I have often read and often heard of the distrust
and jealousy that accompany love; but I think that such a love must be a
vulgar and low senti