en. How could they speak, in this first
consecrated moment? They felt so much, that language failed. They
lay heart to heart, and only God understood their hollow sighs, their
unspoken prayers, their suppressed tears. Only God was with them! God
sent through the open doors the fresh fragrance of the flowers; He
sent the winds, His messengers, through the tall trees, and their wild,
melancholy voices were like a solemn organ, accompanying love's last
hymn. In the distant thickets the nightingale raised her melancholy
notes, for love's last greeting. Thus eternal Nature greets the dying
sons of men.

God was with His children. Their thoughts were prayers; their eyes,
which at first were fixed upon each other, now turned pleadingly to
heaven.

"I shall soon be there!" said Prince Augustus--"soon! I shall live a
true life, and this struggle with death will soon be over. For sixteen
years I have been slowly dying, day by day, hour by hour. Laura, it has
been sixteen years, has it not?"

She bowed silently.

"No," said he, gazing earnestly upon her; "it was but yesterday. I know
now that it was but yesterday. You are just the same--unchanged, my
Laura. This is the same angel-face which I have carried in my heart.
Nothing is changed, and I thank God for it. It would have been a great
grief to look upon you and find a strange face by my side. This is my
Laura, my own Laura, who left me sixteen years ago. And now, look at
me steadily; see what life has made of me; see how it has mastered
me--tortured me to death with a thousand wounds! I call no man my
murderer, but I die of these wounds. Oh, Laura! why did you forsake
me? Why did you not leave this miserable, hypocritical, weary world of
civilization, and follow me to the New World, where the happiness of a
true life awaited us?"

"I dared not," said she; "God demanded this offering of me, and because
I loved you boundlessly I was strong to submit. God also knows what it
cost me, and how these many years I have struggled with my heart, and
tried to learn to forget."

"Struggle no longer, Laura, I am dying; when I am dead you dare not
forget me."

She embraced him with soft tenderness.

"No, no," whispered she, "God is merciful! He will not rob me of the
only consolation of my joyless, solitary life. I had only this. To
think he lives, he breathes the same air, he looks up into the same
heavens--the same quiet stars greet him and me. And a day will come in
which mill