sweetness to sweetness; from the absorbing sense of present love, to the remembrance of the last words and the features of the beloved, a state in which there is almost neither past nor future. I am ashamed of myself; but perhaps I was not capable of such passion. She, in a word, loved more than I-the true prologue to such marriages as are "made in Heaven." What had effected the difference between the Eleanor of to-day and any day for the last many years preceding was, I recognised, not so much that I loved her more, as that circumstances had led me to conceive the possibility, the desirability of a new relation between us, in which I should have more perfect and undivided right to love her; in which (a further privilege) her maidenly reserve might no longer restrain an affection for me which I had never doubted, and till that day had never thought of fathoming. But this difference was everything. Like Corporal Trim, "it was on a Sunday in the afternoon when I fell in love" (or, rather, knew that I was so) "all at once with a sisserara.—It burst upon me, an' please your honour, like a bomb,-scarce giving one time to say "God bless me!" "I was in the way of it;" and yet, like the Corporal's master, I was certainly only as much in love as any man usually is."

External circumstance as frequently appears imperative in directing man, as the very best and timeliest counsel. No one is quite such a creature of pure reason as he fancies himself. The two families had hitherto lived together without further thought, as it seemed, than neighbourly friendship. Robert and Eleanor had been children a week before with Cecilia and me. But my sister's engagement had raised her and Robert to the higher rank, if higher, of the mature life; and I was to share it. Eleanor was now the only person as it were untransformed. With what pretty archness she had talked of her brother and Cecilia! how "rosed over with the virgin crimson of modesty" in her allusions to the newly aroused attention he had given to his accomplishments— to his appearance-even, in some degree, to her! When I spoke of what lay dimly beneath all the joy of the event,-how Cecilia could leave her mother-she had pleaded the dear duties, the higher demands that belong to wifehood with assurance as decided as if herself a wife, instead of being true maid, timid and unforecasting, to whose mind the idea of separation from home had never consciously presented itself.

Her absolute unsuspicion of any future of her own had aided me, when once I had admitted the gracious hope, materially to anticipate it. Had Eleanor been the most skilful of flirts, she could not have revealed her own confiding affection for me, dear child, more winningly.

"Now we shall be so nearly connected, dear Edmund," she said "I shall look for your help more in many things-may I not? You will be here a great deal more, and help me on in that horrid German, and, I may bring the accounts of the Society" (some village charity) "to you when-whenever Robert is away." Then she told how glad for Robert's sake her father was that he should have me for a brother; and how Mrs. Therfield, "who you know was always a little afraid of your dear mamma, I don't know why" (with a slight consciousness of inaccuracy in this remark), "had been quite reassured by her in the first important interview;" ending with "what a nice thing a marriage was," as she ran to fetch a great labour of the needle, a mighty secret, she was preparing already for the future sister, laughing out like a child with overflowing gaiety. Her unreserve and frank affectionateness would, I thought, have astonished my own dear mother, whose presence always rather frightened Eleanor also through an inherited timidity which led my mother, I remember well, to say more than once when comparing her with Cecilia, "dear child, she is fearfully as well as wonderfully made "-and then look grave at her own want of gravity.

"I am something of a prophet, but not altogether a perfect one," my father began as he entered-words from which I, fresh from University Studies, inferred that Plato's "Phaedrus" had been his evening's study. My prophetic power being, as I supposed, fairly equal with his, I was about to prove it by confessing the subject of my thoughts, when with what appeared an abrupt transition (after Cecilia's manner) he began to talk of the village and of his parishioners. My father was, as I have perhaps already indicated, a clergyman not altogether by vocation. Parochial affairs were not, as with some, always in his path, or before his thought. He was admitted to communion with the Greek Church also, he once said laughingly, after quoting a line from Sophocles, and calling it Scripture.-But something that seemed important in quiet Ardeley had now occurred.

A certain Richard Morden, a labouring man about my own age, after several months' tyrannous warfare with his wife, he said, had disappeared,

and left her and her little girl to what resources a poor woman might create from the stray requirements or find from the charities of the village. "Such things make one's heart sick," he said, "and this poor young man too" (smiling) "who was so like you when a child that I made the mistake and kissed him late one evening at the kitchen door to your mother's great amusement." He must try and discover some employment for Mrs Morden, and meanwhile she might return for a few days, "and though not much of a prophet, I foresee the days may likely enough prove months," to our house, where she had been in service before her marriage, which (as happens so frequently in rural courtships that it does not provoke serious blame on the part of sensible and kind hearted employers) had not too long preceded the child's birth.

He was glad to think, he said, after rapidly discussing these details, that the man in his last savage fit had spared the little one, towards which he had never, to his knowledge, showed a father's love. "But how much do we know of the feelings of the poor on these matters? Their affections are to me the most inscrutable thing about them: so coloured by circumstances which with us rarely, except by downright folly or selfishness, touch our inner life and home relations-But your doppelganger," as Cecilia called him once, does no particular credit to his likeness ! I must find myself a curate, or the parish will suffer, he concluded.

"Why not Robert? he will take orders before the marriage" I said; "Eleanor told me to day."

"Ah indeed" he cried, smiling, and I expected that my casual mention of her name would have recalled his thoughts to their probable current when he came in-but they were with one nearer his heart than Eleanor. "I might have fallen on that myself too; excellent! and then Robert will not leave Ardeley, and Cecilia will not have to part from her mother."

"Indeed how that separation could be-how it could ever be imagined-has been my one difficulty, the only blot on this great achievement of his."

"Yes, dear child, exactly," he answered; "I have trembled whenever I thought of it: if ever two persons could be said to have one individual life it is your dear sister and her mother. It is strange that Cecilia, in

all respects but this so independent, I may say so nobly selfsustained, should lean on her mother with the helpless reliance almost of a three year child. "Ah," he continued, warming as he spoke into an unaccustomed passion, "Cecilia loves her with a love truly without fear and without restraint. Most girls, in the first proud days at least of an engagement, would give that their prevailing thoughts, and pre-enact the marriage state in the betrothal. I see in her eyes how frankly she returns Robert's affection-yet towards her mother she is not ashamed to be the little one of the nursery still. However she may cleave to Robert, she will not leave her."

"Cecilia gives one sign of her affection " my father presently added (in this dear daughter unconsciously describing himself), "which I have always thought infallible in its depth, and so touching. Before her mother has expressed a wish I have often seen Cecilia anticipate it. Like Virgil in the poem when receiving the commands of Beatrice, she almost thinks her obedience tardy unless as her mother speaks she has already obeyed her. I do not mean to accuse Cecilia of second sight" he added, smiling "for it is only in little matters of course, and such desires as perhaps are guessed by woman's finer tact, or read in the eyes of those who are themselves quick-sighted; yet her anticipation has often charmed and startled me. Great love, I have thought, thus manifested, in the world's estimate must seem far nearer allied to madness than the wit or wisdom of the poet's proverbial couplet: but oh! how precious to other judges is this holy enthusiasm of passion! You will think your father, however, overcome himself by what I am praising in Cecilia."

"Not at all," I said, "I quite agree, and only to-day."-But as I hesitated how to lay Robert's strange communication before him my father bade me good-night. "We will not discuss her character, the dear child, now, or like Socrates when he praised Love, we shall find ourselves both 'talking in dithyrambs' together."

CHAPTER X.

When there are love and easy circumstances, all homes may be held happy; but this happiness, as the shrewd preacher remarked to Boswell about Heaven, has its degree. Measured by their respective capacities,

Fountainhall was inferior to Ardeley. My home contained three persons (myself I have already excluded from this honourable distinction) capable each of passion, and intellectually gifted in a degree, which, partially as I may perhaps judge the blessings I shared so long, I am yet inclined to consider rare even amongst the many happy homes of England. Robert could not escape some consciousness of a difference which my dear mother's frequent and delicate praise of his own family -rather I should say the bright hue which her graceful attention threw over it with a woman's especial tact in these matters-may perhaps have only deepened. I had excellent reasons for silence on the topic, and cannot say whether the effect of the fact was to retard, or to increase Robert's wish for removing himself and Eleanor from Ardeley.

Looking back, however, now after so many years, I see that this was one of two causes I have to mention, by whose operation that marriage, and my own commencing courtship of Eleanor, were delayed to a period when matters we less dreamed of than the Lisbon of the thirty-first of October, 1755, dreamed of earthquake, threatened to disperse that Fata Morgana vision of love and happiness which we both now thought we saw before us on the near horizon.

Cecilia first-and it is her story which renders the detail of the previous chapters in my eyes at least excusable -Cecilia seemed to feel a daily increasing conviction that to part from her mother, even if the separation were but to take another name, and Fountainhall for a home in place of Ardeley, was for her a thing all but impossible. Loving Robert more for the manly patience and gentleness with which he moulded his mind and reined in his wishes to accept the workings of an affection so natural, that in the Lady of his Love he at least could not esteem it overstrained - she could not however, with all her courage, confront the change in its fullness. To love her mother less, if this, as it seemed, must be the duty, -the result,-of a wife's position, she could not bear it. Many tears long after, I am sure, Cecilia shed to expiate an irresolution or timidity which the common estimate that almost regards these qualities as female graces, will not think needed expiation. Perhaps she erred in excess of loving weakness: perhaps it was the secret prevision of hours when the allegiance of an undivided affection was to be required imperiously for the service of mortal