two rich estates, and was rendered highly expedient, if not
indispensable, by the testamentary dispositions of the parents on both
sides. Edgar Vaughan, the promised bridegroom, had been bred from
infancy in Europe, and had never seen the beautiful girl whose heart he
was to claim as his inheritance. But already, for several years, a
correspondence had been kept up between tine cousins, and had produced an
intellectual intimacy, though it could but imperfectly acquaint them with
each other's character.

Sylvia was shy, sensitive, and fanciful; and her guardian's secluded
habits had shut her out from even so much of the world as is generally
open to maidens of her age. She had been left to seek associates and
friends for herself in the haunts of imagination, and to converse with
them, sometimes in the language of dead poets, oftener in the poetry of
her own mind. The companion whom she chiefly summoned up was the cousin
with whose idea her earliest thoughts had been connected. She made a
vision of Edgar Vaughan, and tinted it with stronger hues than a mere
fancy-picture, yet graced it with so many bright and delicate
perfections, that her cousin could nowhere have encountered so dangerous
a rival. To this shadow she cherished a romantic fidelity. With its
airy presence sitting by her side, or gliding along her favorite paths,
the loneliness of her young life was blissful; her heart was satisfied
with love, while yet its virgin purity was untainted by the earthliness
that the touch of a real lover would have left there. Edgar Vaughan
seemed to be conscious of her character; for, in his letters, he gave her
a name that was happily appropriate to the sensitiveness of her
disposition, the delicate peculiarity of her manners, and the ethereal
beauty both of her mind and person. Instead of Sylvia, he called her
Sylph,--with the prerogative of a cousin and a lover,--his dear Sylph
Etherege.