when she heard it, she would creep to his side, and put her little
hand on his, and look up to him with eyes in whose tender and
glistening blue the spirit of her mother seemed to float. She was
serious and thoughtful and loving beyond the usual capacities of
childhood; perhaps her solitary condition and habits of constant
intercourse with one so grave as Mordaunt, and who always, when not
absent on his excursions of charity, loved her to be with him, had
given to her mind a precocity of feeling, and tinctured the simplicity
of infancy with what ought to have been the colours of after years.
She was not inclined to the sports of her age; she loved, rather, and
above all else, to sit by Mordaunt's side and silently pore over some
books or feminine task, and to steal her eyes every now and then away
from her employment, in order to watch his motions or provide for
whatever her vigilant kindness of heart imagined he desired. And
often, when he saw her fairy and lithe form hovering about him and
attending on his wants, or her beautiful countenance glow with
pleasure, when she fancied she supplied them, he almost believed that
Isabel yet lived, though in another form, and that a love so intense
and holy as hers had been, might transmigrate, but could not perish.

The young Isabel had displayed a passion for music so early that it
almost seemed innate; and as, from the mild and wise education she
received, her ardour had never been repelled on the one hand or
overstrained on the other, so, though she had but just passed her
seventh year, she had attained to a singular proficiency in the art,--
an art that suited well with her lovely face and fond feelings and
innocent heart; and it was almost heavenly, in the literal acceptation
of the word, to hear her sweet though childish voice swell along the
still pure airs of summer, and to see her angelic countenance all rapt
and brilliant with the enthusiasm which her own melodies created.