mistress because it was so mixed with the imagination, quarrelled with
the body, for the soul which inspired and preserved it.

Yet we do not say that Madeline was so possessed by the confidence of her
love, that she did not admit the intrusion of a single doubt or fear;
when she recalled the frequent gloom and moody fitfulness of her lover--
his strange and mysterious communings with self--the sorrow which, at
times, as on that Sabbath eve when he wept upon her bosom, appeared
suddenly to come upon a nature so calm and stately, and without a visible
cause; when she recalled all these symptoms of a heart not now at rest,
it was not possible for her to reject altogether a certain vague and
dreary apprehension. Nor did she herself, although to Ellinor she so
affected, ascribe this cloudiness and caprice of mood merely to the
result of a solitary and meditative life; she attributed them to the
influence of an early grief, perhaps linked with the affections, and did
not doubt but that one day or another she should learn its secret. As for
remorse--the memory of any former sin--a life so austerely blameless, a
disposition so prompt to the activity of good, and so enamoured of its
beauty--a mind so cultivated, a temper so gentle, and a heart so easily
moved--all would have forbidden, to natures far more suspicious than
Madeline's, the conception of such a thought. And so, with a patient
gladness, though not without some mixture of anxiety, she suffered
herself to glide onward to a future, which, come cloud, come shine, was,
she believed at least, to be shared with him.

On looking over the various papers from which I have woven this tale, I
find a letter from Madeline to Aram, dated at this time. The characters,
traced in the delicate and fair Italian hand coveted at that period, are
fading, and, in one part, wholly obliterated by time; but there seems to
me so much of what is genuine in the heart's beautiful romance in this