oughts are truly in the heart of
Amelie de Repentigny respecting me? Does she recollect me only as
her brother's companion, who may possibly have some claim upon her
friendship, but none upon her love?" His imagination pictured every look
she had given him since his return. Not all! Oh, Pierre Philibert! the
looks you would have given worlds to catch, you were unconscious of!
Every word she had spoken, the soft inflection of every syllable of her
silvery voice lingered in his ear. He had caught meanings where
perhaps no meaning was, and missed the key to others which he knew were
there--never, perhaps, to be revealed to him. But although he questioned
in the name of love, and found many divine echoes in her words,
imperceptible to every ear but his own, he could not wholly solve the
riddle of his life. Still he hoped.

"If love creates love, as some say it does," thought he, "Amelie de
Repentigny cannot be indifferent to a passion which governs every
impulse of my being! But is there any especial merit in loving her
whom all the world cannot help admiring equally with myself? I am
presumptuous to think so!--and more presumptuous still to expect, after
so many years of separation and forgetfulness, that her heart, so loving
and so sympathetic, has not already bestowed its affection upon some one
more fortunate than me."

While Pierre tormented himself with these sharp thorns of doubt,--and
of hopes painful as doubts,--little did he think what a brave, loving
spirit was hid under the silken vesture of Amelie de Repentigny, and
how hard was her struggle to conceal from his eyes those tender regards,
which, with over-delicacy, she accounted censurable because they were
wholly spontaneous.

He little thought how entirely his image had filled her heart during
those years when she dreamed of him in the quiet cloister, living in a
world of bright imaginings of her own; how she had prayed for his safety
and welfare as she would have prayed for the soul of one dead,--never
thinking, or even hoping, to see him again.

Pierre had become to her as one of the disembodied saints or angels
whose pictures looked down from the wall of the Convent chapel--the
bright angel of the Annunciation or the youthful Baptist proclaiming the
way of the Lord. Now that Pierre Philibert was alive in the
flesh,--a man, beautiful, brave, honorable, and worthy of any woman's
love,--Amelie was frightened. She had not looked for that, and yet it
had co