half-unrevealed, and mystic emotions of first love, but because Lady
Diary's letters had been so full of her sister's declining health, of her
own anxieties and fears, that he had shrunk from giving her a new subject
of anxiety; and a confidence full of hope and joy seemed to him unfeeling
and unseasonable. He knew how necessarily uneasy and restless an avowal
that his heart was seriously engaged to one she had never seen, would
make that tender mother, and that his confession would rather add to her
cares than produce sympathy with his transports. But now, feeling
impatient for his mother's assent to the formal proposals which had
become due to Madame Dalibard and Helen, and taking advantage of the
letter last received from her, which gave more cheering accounts of her
sister, and expressed curiosity for further explanation as to his half
disclosure, he wrote at length, and cleared his breast of all its
secrets. It was the same day in which he wrote this confession and
pleaded his cause that we accompany him to the house of his sweet
mistress, and leave him by her side, in the accustomed garden. Within,
Madame Dalibard, whose chair was set by the window, bent over certain
letters, which she took, one by one, from her desk and read slowly,
lifting her eyes from time to time and glancing towards the young people
as they walked, hand in hand, round the small demesnes, now hid by the
fading foliage, now emerging into view. Those letters were the early
love-epistles of William Mainwaring. She had not recurred to them for
years. Perhaps she now felt that food necessary to the sustainment of
her fiendish designs. It was a strange spectacle to see this being, so
full of vital energy, mobile and restless as a serpent, condemned to that
helpless decrepitude, chained to the uneasy seat, not as in the resigned
and passive imbecility of extreme age, but rather as one whom in the
prime of life the rack has broken, leaving the limbs inert, the mind
active, the form as one dead, the heart with superabundant vigour,--a,
cripple's impotence and a Titan's will! What, in that dreary