EVENING, with its passionless influences, was stealing softly down,
and leaving on all things its hues of quiet and repose. The heart of
nature was beating with calm and even pulses. Not so the heart of
Edwin Florence. It had a wilder throb; and the face of nature was
not reflected in the mirror of his feelings, He was alone in his
room, where he had been during the few hours that had elapsed since
his interview with Miss Linmore. In those few hours, Memory had
turned over many leaves of the Book of his Life. He would fain have
averted his eyes from the pages, but he could not. The record was
before him, and he had read it. And, as he read, the eyes of Edith
looked into his own; at first they were loving and tender, as of
old; and then. they were full of tears. Her hand lay, now,
confidingly in his; and now it was slowly withdrawn. She sat by his
side, and leaned upon him--his lips were upon her lips; his cheek
touching her cheek; their breaths were mingling. Another moment and
he had turned from her coldly, and she was drooping towards the
earth like a tender vine bereft of the support to which it had held
by its clinging tendrils. Ah! If he could only have shut out these
images! If he could have erased the record so that Memory could not
read it! How eagerly would he have drunk of Lethe's waters, could he
have found the fabled stream!

More than all this. The rebuke of Miss Linmore almost maddened him.
In turning from Edith, he had let his heart go out towards the other
with a passionate devotion. Pride in her beauty and brilliant