elf to a temper peculiarly
alive to the generosity that leans towards the weak and the wronged;
the engaging mixture of mildness and gaiety with which she tended
her peevish and sneering uncle, convinced him of her better and more
enduring qualities of disposition and womanly heart. And even--so
strange and contradictory are our feelings--the very remembrance that
she was connected with a family so hateful to him made her own image the
more bright from the darkness that surrounded it. For was it not with
the daughter of his foe that the lover of Verona fell in love at first
sight? And is not that a common type of us all--as if Passion delighted
in contradictions? As the Diver, in Schiller's exquisite ballad,
fastened upon the rock of coral in the midst of the gloomy sea, so we
cling the more gratefully to whatever of fair thought and gentle shelter
smiles out to us in the depths of Hate and Strife.

But, perhaps, Vaudemont would not so suddenly and so utterly have
rendered himself to a passion that began, already, completely to master
his strong spirit, if he had not, from Camilla's embarrassment, her
timidity, her blushes, intoxicated himself with the belief that his
feelings were not unshared. And who knows not that such a belief, once
cherished, ripens our own love to a development in which hours are as
years?

It was, then, with such emotions as made him almost insensible to every
thought but the luxury of breathing the same air as his cousin, which
swept from his mind the Past, the Future--leaving nothing but a joyous,
a breathless PRESENT on the Face of Time, that he repaired to Beaufort
Court. He did not return to H---- before he went, but he wrote to Fanny
a short and hurried line to explain that he might be absent for some
days at least, and promised to write again, if he should be detained
longer than he anticipated.

In the meanwhile, one of those successive revolutions which had marked
the eras in Fanny's moral existence took its date from that last time
they had walked and conversed together.

The very evening of that day, some hours after Philip was gone, and
after Simon had retired to rest, Fanny was sitting before the dying fire
in the little parlour in an attitude of deep and pensive reverie. The
old woman-servant, Sarah, who, very different from Mrs. Boxer, loved
Fanny with her whole heart, came into the room as was her wont before
going to bed, to see that the fire was duly out, and all safe: and