has been, as you
may well conceive, unusually restless the whole of this agonizing day.
Ah, Walter, would to God you had never left us!"

"Rather say," rejoined Walter--"that this unhappy man, against whom my
father's ashes still seem to me to cry aloud, had never come into our
peaceful and happy valley! Then you would not have reproached me, that I
have sought justice on a suspected murderer; nor I have longed for death
rather than, in that justice, have inflicted such distress and horror on
those whom I love the best!"

"What! Walter, you yet believe--you are yet convinced that Eugene Aram
is the real criminal?"

"Let to-morrow shew," answered Walter. "But poor, poor Madeline! How
does she bear up against this long suspense? You know I have not seen
her for months."

"Oh! Walter," said Ellinor, weeping bitterly, "you would not know her,
so dreadfully is she altered. I fear--" (here sobs choaked the sister's
voice, so as to leave it scarcely audible)--"that she is not many weeks
for this world!"

"Great God! is it so?" exclaimed Walter, so shocked, that the tree
against which he leant scarcely preserved him from falling to the
ground, as the thousand remembrances of his first love rushed upon his
heart. "And Providence singled me out of the whole world, to strike this
blow!"

Despite her own grief, Ellinor was touched and smitten by the violent
emotion of her cousin; and the two young persons, lovers--though love
was at this time the least perceptible feeling of their breasts--mingled
their emotions, and sought, at least to console and cheer each other.

"It may yet be better than our fears," said Ellinor, soothingly. "Eugene
may be found guiltless, and in that joy we may forget all the past."

Walter shook his head despondingly. "Your heart, Ellinor, was always
kind to me. You now are the only one to do me justice, and to see
how utterly reproachless I am for all the misery the crime of another
occasions. But my uncle--him, too, I have not seen for some time: is he
well?"

"Yes, Walter, yes," said Ellinor, kindly disguising the real truth, how
much her father's vigorous frame had been bowed by his state of mind.
"And I, you see," added she, with a faint attempt to smile,--"I am,
in health at least, the same as when, this time last year, we were all
happy and full of hope."

Walter looked hard upon that face, once so vivid with the rich colour
and the buoyant and arch expression of liveliness and youth, n