and flowers, amid the congratulations of a thousand admiring friends,
with heart and step as light as childhood, Madeleine, like victims,
dressed in flowers and gold, led to the alter of Jupiter in the
Capitol of old, was conducted from the bridal alter to the sacrifice
of her future joy. Story oft told in the vicissitudes of betrayed
innocence and in the fate of those who build their happiness in the
castles of fancy: like the brilliancy of sunset her moment of pleasure
faded; the novelty and tinsel of her gilded home lost their charm,
and the virtue of her childhood was wrecked on golden rocks. She no
longer went to daily Mass; her visits to the convent became less
frequent, her dress lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of
pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane
and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in
the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated,
feverish air of perverse influences that tainted her gilded home.

Sixteen years of sorrow and repentance had passed over Madeleine,
and found her, at the commencement of our narrative, the victim of
consumption and internal anguish, the more keen because the more secret.
The outward world believed her happy; many silly maidens, in moments
of vanity, deemed they could have gained heaven if they were possessed
of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were
the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning
of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the
blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the
flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever
flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of
regret over the ill-fated Madeleine, whose discolored eye and attenuated
form, whose pallid cheek, furrowed by incessant tears, told the wreck
of a beautiful girl sinking to an early tomb.