d when she heard it, she
would creep to his side, and put her little hand on his, and look up
to him with eyes in whose tender and glistening blue the spirit of her
mother seemed to float. She was serious and thoughtful and loving beyond
the usual capacities of childhood; perhaps her solitary condition and
habits of constant intercourse with one so grave as Mordaunt, and who
always, when not absent on his excursions of charity, loved her to be
with him, had given to her mind a precocity of feeling, and tinctured
the simplicity of infancy with what ought to have been the colours of
after years. She was not inclined to the sports of her age; she loved,
rather, and above all else, to sit by Mordaunt's side and silently pore
over some books or feminine task, and to steal her eyes every now and
then away from her employment, in order to watch his motions or provide
for whatever her vigilant kindness of heart imagined he desired. And
often, when he saw her fairy and lithe form hovering about him and
attending on his wants, or her beautiful countenance glow with pleasure,
when she fancied she supplied them, he almost believed that Isabel yet
lived, though in another form, and that a love so intense and holy as
hers had been, might transmigrate, but could not perish.

The young Isabel had displayed a passion for music so early that it
almost seemed innate; and as, from the mild and wise education she
received, her ardour had never been repelled on the one hand or
overstrained on the other, so, though she had but just passed her
seventh year, she had attained to a singular proficiency in the art,--an
art that suited well with her lovely face and fond feelings and innocent
heart; and it was almost heavenly, in the literal acceptation of the
word, to hear her sweet though childish voice swell along the still
pure airs of summer, and to see her angelic countenance all rapt and
brilliant with the enthusiasm which her own melodies created.

Never had she borne the bitter breath of unkindness, nor writhed beneath
that customary injustice which punishes in others the sins of our own
temper and the varied fretfulness of caprice; and so she had none of
the fears and meannesses and acted untruths which so usually pollute and
debase the innocence of childhood. But the promise of her ingenuous brow
(over which the silken hair flowed, parted into two streams of gold),
and of the fearless but tender eyes, and of the quiet smile which sat
for