m she reinclosed, after puzzling
himself in vain to form any new conjectures as to the quarter whence it
came, felt that under his present circumstances it would be an absurd
Quixotism to refuse to apply what the very Providence to whom he had
anew consigned himself seemed to have sent to his aid. And it placed
him, too, beyond the offer of all pecuniary assistance from one from
whom he could least have brooked to receive it. He consented, therefore,
to all that the loquacious tailor proposed to him. And it would have
been difficult to have recognised the wild and frenzied fugitive in the
stately form, with its young beauty and air of well-born pride, which
the next day sat by the side of Eugenie. And that day he told his sad
and troubled story, and Eugenie wept: and from that day he came daily;
and two weeks--happy, dreamlike, intoxicating to both--passed by; and as
their last sun set, he was kneeling at her feet, and breathing to one to
whom the homage of wit, and genius, and complacent wealth had hitherto
been vainly proffered, the impetuous, agitated, delicious secrets of
the First Love. He spoke, and rose to depart for ever--when the look and
sigh detained him.

The next day, after a sleepless night, Eugenie de Merville sent for the
Vicomte de Vaudemont.

CHAPTER XIV.

"A silver river small
In sweet accents
Its music vents;
The warbling virginal
To which the merry birds do sing,
Timed with stops of gold the silver string."
Sir Richard Fanshawe.

One evening, several weeks after the events just commemorated, a
stranger, leading in his hand, a young child, entered the churchyard
of H----. The sun had not long set, and the short twilight of deepening
summer reigned in the tranquil skies; you might still hear from the
trees above the graves the chirp of some joyous bird;--what cared he,
the denizen of the skies, for the dead that slept below?--what did
he value save the greenness and repose of the spot,--to him alike
the garden or the grave! As the man and the child passed, the robin,
scarcely scared by their tread from the long grass beside one of the
mounds, looked at them with its bright, blithe eye. It was a famous plot
for the robin--the old churchyard! That domestic bird--"the friend of
man," as it has been called by the poets--found a jolly supper among the
worms!

The stranger, on reaching the middle of the sacred ground, paused and
looked