diate all mental darkness. It was not like a human
loveliness that these gentle smiles went and came; but as a sunbeam on
a lake, now light and now obscure, flitting before as you strove to
catch them, and fold them for ever to your heart. I saw this smile
fade for ever. Alas! I could never have believed that it was indeed
Elinor that died if once when I spoke she had not lifted her almost
benighted eyes, and for one moment like nought beside on earth, more
lovely than a sunbeam, slighter, quicker than the waving plumage of a
bird, dazzling as lightning and like it giving day to night, yet mild
and faint, that smile came; it went, and then there was an end of all
joy to me."

Thus his own sorrows, or the shapes copied from nature that dwelt in
his mind with beauty greater than their own, occupied our talk while I
railed in my own griefs with cautious secresy. If for a moment he
shewed curiosity, my eyes fell, my voice died away and my evident
suffering made him quickly endeavour to banish the ideas he had
awakened; yet he for ever mingled consolation in his talk, and tried
to soften my despair by demonstrations of deep sympathy and
compassion. "We are both unhappy--" he would say to me; "I have told
you my melancholy tale and we have wept together the loss of that
lovely spirit that has so cruelly deserted me; but you hide your
griefs: I do not ask you to disclose them, but tell me if I may not
console you. It seems to me a wild adventure to find in this desart
one like you quite solitary: you are young and lovely; your manners
are refined and attractive; yet there is in your settled melancholy,
and something, I know not what, in your expressive eyes that seems to
seperate you from your kind: you shudder; pardon me, I entreat you
but I cannot help expressing this once at least the lively interest I
feel in your destiny.

"You never smile: your voice is low, and you utter your words as if
you were afraid of the slight sound they would produce: the expression
of awful and intense sorrow never for a moment fades from your
countenance. I have lost for ever the loveliest companion that any man
could ever have possessed, one who rather appears to have been a
superior spirit who by some strange accident wandered among us earthly
creatures, than as belonging to our kind. Yet I smile, and sometimes I
speak almost forgetful of the change I have endured. But your sad mien
never alters; your pulses beat and you breathe, yet you s