myself from Trevanion's periodical dinners. Miss Trevanion at first
rallied me on my seclusion, with her usual lively malice. But I
continued worthily to complete my martyrdom. I took care that no
reproachful look at the gayety that wrung my soul should betray my
secret. Then Fanny seemed either hurt or disdainful, and avoided
altogether entering her father's study; all at once, she changed her
tactics, and was seized with a strange desire for knowledge, which
brought her into the room to look for a book, or ask a question, ten
times a day. I was proof to all. But, to speak truth, I was profoundly
wretched. Looking back now, I am dismayed at the remembrance of my own
sufferings: my health became seriously affected; I dreaded alike the
trial of the day and the anguish of the night. My only distractions
were in my visits to Vivian and my escape to the dear circle of home.
And that home was my safeguard and preservative in that crisis of my
life; its atmosphere of unpretended honor and serene virtue strengthened
all my resolutions; it braced me for my struggles against the strongest
passion which youth admits, and counteracted the evil vapors of that air
in which Vivian's envenomed spirit breathed and moved. Without the
influence of such a home, if I had succeeded in the conduct that probity
enjoined towards those in whose house I was a trusted guest, I do not
think I could have resisted the contagion of that malign and morbid
bitterness against fate and the world which love, thwarted by fortune,
is too inclined of itself to conceive, and in the expression of which
Vivian was not without the eloquence that belongs to earnestness,
whether in truth or falsehood. But, somehow or other, I never left the
little room that contained the grand suffering in the face of the
veteran soldier, whose lip, often quivering with anguish, was never
heard to murmur, and the tranquil wisdom which had succeeded my father's
early trials (trials like my own), and the loving smile on my mother's
tender face, and the innocent childhood of Blanche (by which name the