Poor Alvira! Her morning dawned after a restless, sleepless night.
Phantoms of terror haunted her couch. The agonies of anticipated
remorse had cast a withering shadow on her thoughts. She could not
believe her own depravity in entertaining for a moment such a thrilling
temptation.

Was it a dream? Was it the hallucination of a spirit of evil that
revels in the human passions? "I, who love my father notwithstanding
his faults, who would tremble at the gaze of my mother looking down
from heaven on my awful impiety, and would hear from her tomb her
scream of terror, her curse of vengeance on my parricidal guilt--could
I be the foolish wretch that would consent to a deed of crime which
would make me a fugitive from the face of men, and haunt my rest with
the ghost of a murdered father?"

Thus Alvira mused. But a demon laughed at her tender conscience; deep
in hell they had forged a terrible temptation. They knew the walls
of the citadel of morality, built alone on natural virtue and unaided
by divine grace, would soon crumble before their powerful machinations.
In moments of sober reflection our resolutions are like prisms of
basalt, that will not be riven by the lightning, but which in the hour
of real trial prove to be ice-crystals that a sunbeam can dissolve.
The powers that wage war with frail humanity have hung on the portals
of the infernal kingdom, as trophies of triumph over man and insult
to God, the resolutions of mortals made in moments of fervor and
broken in weakness.

Days roll on; they bring their sunshine and clouds, but no change in