ost sure
my own wild brain coined the words that seemed to come from his lips in
the storm--alone, unloved--what remains for me but----

"A great disappointment has fallen upon General Harrington. A will is
found, and every dollar of his wife's property is left to her son. All
this seems incomprehensible. I pity the proud old man.

----"It is all over now! Oh, Heaven, that I should have so deceived
myself! Harrington loves another--Lucy whom he has known almost since
childhood, and from whom a series of untoward circumstances separated
him. There is, there can be no doubt--no room for a single hope--the
General himself informed me of it to-day.

"I cannot write--I cannot even think! There is a strange confusion in my
brain--a fever in my heart which give me no rest. I long for some one to
advise me--some one to whom I can look for sympathy--but I have no
counsellor. Kindred--mine are in the grave! Friends--the last one sleeps
in the cemetery yonder--in the wide world I am utterly alone. The
General grows kinder to me daily, but to him how could I speak of all
these things? No! I must bury the secret deep, deep in my own
heart--must endure this suffering in silence and alone.

"I have but one wish now--could I but be the means of uniting James
Harrington with the woman he loves. The only consolation left to me,
would be to know that he was happy, and that it was to me he owed that
happiness. But I can do nothing; the General only hinted at some
mysterious history, and he requested me to consider all that he had
revealed as sacred. Is this the secret? Does Lucy Eaton suspect the
unworthiness which it kills me to know?

"Six months in a convent. It is too late to look back, or to retract
anything I have promised. I have consented to become General
Harrington's wife--to fill the place of one who took me to her heart as
if I had been her own child, bestowing upon me the fondness which I
could have no right to claim, except from a mother.

"The change I had remarked in the General's manner was not fancy, as I
strove to think. He desires to make me his wife. He alluded to it
yesterday for the first time, and to-night I gave him my answer. I can
but confess that the arguments he employed were just; a young girl could
not remain in the house with a man no older than he without being
connected to him by a nearer tie than that which binds us. He spoke to
me very kindly, more gently and tenderly than I had thought he could do