I stopped short in the highway, dropped my beautiful companion’s arm, and stood gazing intently in her face, as if I would read her most inmost thoughts through those windows of the soul, her serene, mild, tender, blue eyes.  I saw that the face was colourless, and that the beautiful lips, out of which the words that had alarmed me more by their accents than their direct signification, were quivering in a way that their lovely mistress could not control.  Tears, as large as heavy drops of rain, too, were trembling on the long silken eye-lashes, while the very attitude of the precious girl denoted hopelessness and grief!

“This relates to Grace!” I exclaimed, though my throat was so parched, as almost to choke my utterance.

“Whom, or what else, can now occupy our minds, Miles; I can scarce think of anything but Grace; when I do, it is to remember that my own brother has killed her!”

What answer could I have made to such a speech, had my mind been sufficiently at ease as respects my sister to think of anything else?  As it was, I did not even attempt the vain office of saying anything in the way of alleviating my companion’s keen sense of the misconduct of Rupert.

“Grace is then worse in consequence of this unhappy rencontre?” I observed, rather than asked.

“Oh!  Miles; what a conversation I have had with her, this afternoon!  She speaks, already, more like a being that belongs to the regions of the blessed, than like one of earth!  There is no longer any secret between us.  She would gladly have avoided telling me her precise situation with Rupert, but we had already gone so far, I would know more.  I thought it might relieve her mind; and there was the chance, however slight, of its enabling us to suggest some expedient to produce still further good.  I think it has had some of the first effect, for she is now sleeping.”

“Did Grace say anything of your communicating the miserable tale to me?”

“It is, indeed, a miserable tale!  Miles, they were engaged from the time Grace was fifteen!  Engaged distinctly, and in terms, I mean; not by any of the implied understandings, by which those who were so intimate, generally, might believe themselves bound to each other.”

“And in what manner did so early and long-continued an engagement cease?”

“It came from Rupert, who should have died first, before he was so untrue to himself, to my poor father, to me, to all of us, Miles, as well as to his own manhood.  It has been as we supposed; he has been deluded by the eclat that attaches to these Mertons in our provincial society; and Emily is rather a showy girl, you know,—­at least for those who are accustomed only to our simple habits.”

Alas! little did Lucy then know—­she has learned better since—­that “showy” girls belong much more to our “simple” state of society, than to the state of those which are commonly conceived to be more advanced.  But Emily Merton was, in a slight degree, more artificial in manner, than it was usual for a Manhattanese female of that day, to be, and this was what Lucy meant; Lucy, who always thought so humbly of herself, and was ever so ready to concede to her rivals all that could plausibly be asked in their behalf.