VIII.

Hushed, where the Star's soft angel loves to keep
Watch o'er their tide, the morning waters roll;
So glides my spirit,--darkness in the deep,
But o'er the wave the presence of thy soul!



Gertrude had not as yet the presentiments that filled the soul of
Trevylyan. She thought too little of herself to know her danger, and
those hours to her were hours of unmingled sweetness. Sometimes, indeed,
the exhaustion of her disease tinged her spirits with a vague sadness, an
abstraction came over her, and a languor she vainly struggled against.
These fits of dejection and gloom touched Trevylyan to the quick; his eye
never ceased to watch them, nor his heart to soothe. Often when he
marked them, he sought to attract her attention from what he fancied,
though erringly, a sympathy with his own forebodings, and to lead her
young and romantic imagination through the temporary beguilements of
fiction; for Gertrude was yet in the first bloom of youth, and all the
dews of beautiful childhood sparkled freshly from the virgin blossoms of
her mind. And Trevylyan, who had passed some of his early years among
the students of Leipsic, and was deeply versed in the various world of
legendary lore, ransacked his memory for such tales as seemed to him most
likely to win her interest; and often with false smiles entered into the
playful tale, or oftener, with more faithful interest, into the graver
legend of trials that warned yet beguiled them from their own. Of such
tales I have selected but a few; I know not that they are the least
unworthy of repetition,--they are those which many recollections induce
me to repeat the most willingly. Gertrude loved these stories, for she