last throb of this heart is stilled--write me one word of comfort
and of pardon. You will believe what I have imperfectly written, for
you ever trusted my faith, if you have blamed my faults. I am now
comparatively happy--a word from you will, make me blest. And Fate
has, perhaps, been more merciful to both, than in our shortsighted and
querulous human vision, we might, perhaps, believe; for now that the
frame is brought low--and in the solitude of my chamber I can duly and
humbly commune with mine own heart, I see the aspect of those faults
which I once mistook for virtues--and feel that, had we been united, I,
loving you ever, might not have constituted your happiness, and so have
known the misery of losing your affection. May He who formed you for
glorious and yet all unaccomplished purposes strengthen you, when these
eyes can no longer sparkle at your triumphs, or weep at your lightest
sorrow. You will go on in your broad and luminous career:--a few years,
and my remembrance will have left but the vestige of a dream behind.
But, but--I can write no more. God bless you!"

CHAPTER IV.

"Oh, stop this headlong current of your goodness;
It comes too fast upon a feeble soul."
DRYDEN: _Sebastian and Doras_.

THE smooth physician had paid his evening visit; Lord Saxingham had gone
to a cabinet dinner, for Life must ever walk side by side with Death:
and Lady Florence Lascelles was alone. It was a room adjoining her
sleeping-apartment--a room in which, in the palmy days of the brilliant
and wayward heiress, she had loved to display her fanciful and peculiar
taste. There had she been accustomed to muse, to write, to study--there
had she first been dazzled by the novel glow of Ernest's undiurnal and
stately thoughts--there had she first conceived the romance of girlhood,
which had led her to confer with him, unknown--there had she first
confessed to herself that fancy had begotten love--there had she gone
through love's short and exhausting process of lone emotion;--the
doubt, the hope, the ecstasy; the reverse, the terror; the inanimate
despondency, the agonised despair! And there now, sadly and patiently,
she awaited the gradual march of inevitable decay. And books and
pictures, and musical instruments, and marble busts, half shadowed
by classic draperies--and all the delicate elegancies of womanly
refinement--still invested the chamber with a grace as cheerful as if
youth and beauty were to be the occupan