As she was a rural heiress, she did not want for suitors.  Many advantageous offers were made her, but she refused them all.  She laughed at the pretended pangs of her admirers, and triumphed over them with the caprice of buoyant youth and conscious beauty.  With all her apparent levity, however, could any one have read the story of her heart, they might have traced in it some fond remembrance of her early playmate, not so deeply graven as to be painful, but too deep to be easily obliterated; and they might have noticed, amidst all her gayety, the tenderness that marked her manner towards the mother of Eugene.  She would often steal away from her youthful companions and their amusements, to pass whole days with the good widow; listening to her fond talk about her boy, and blushing with secret pleasure, when his letters were read, at finding herself a constant theme of recollection and inquiry.

At length the sudden return of peace, which sent many a warrior to his native cottage, brought back Eugene, a young sun-burnt soldier, to the village.  I need not say how rapturously his return was greeted by his mother, who saw in him the pride and staff of her old age.  He had risen in the service by his merits; but brought away little from the wars, excepting a soldier-like air, a gallant name, and a scar across the forehead.  He brought back, however, a nature unspoiled by the camp.  He was frank, open, generous, and ardent.  His heart was quick and kind in its impulses, and was perhaps a little softer from having suffered:  it was full of tenderness for Annette.  He had received frequent accounts of her from his mother; and the mention of her kindness to his lonely parent, had rendered her doubly dear to him.  He had been wounded; he had been a prisoner; he had been in various troubles, but had always preserved the braid of her hair, which she had bound round his arm.  It had been a kind of talisman to him; he had many a time looked upon it as he lay on the hard ground, and the thought that he might one day see Annette again, and the fair fields about his native village, had cheered his heart, and enabled him to bear up against every hardship.

He had left Annette almost a child—­he found her a blooming woman.  If he had loved her before, he now adored her.  Annette was equally struck with the improvement which time had made in her lover.  She noticed, with secret admiration, his superiority to the other young men of the village; the frank, lofty, military air, that distinguished him from all the rest at their rural gatherings.  The more she saw him, the more her light, playful fondness of former years deepened into ardent and powerful affection.  But Annette was a rural belle.