changed its character to something far more touching and impressive than health itself with all its blooming hues could have bestowed.  Her features were certainly thinner, but there was visible in them a serene but mournful spirit—­a voluptuous languor, heightened and spiritualized by purity and intellect into an expression that realized our notions rather of angelic beauty than of the loveliness of mere woman.  To all this, sorrow had added a dignity so full of melancholy and commanding grace—­a seriousness indicative of such truth and honor—­as to make the heart of the spectator wonder, and the eye almost to weep on witnessing an association so strange and incomprehensible, as that of such beauty and evident goodness with sufferings that seem rather like crimes against purity and innocence, and almost tempt the weak heart to revolt against the dispensations of Providence.

When their eyes rested on each other, is it necessary to say that the melancholy position of Lucy was soon read in those large orbs that seemed about to dissolve into tears?  The shock of the stranger’s sudden and unexpected appearance, when taken in connection with the loss of him forever, and the sacrifice of her love and happiness, which, to save her father’s life, she had so heroically and nobly made, was so strong, she felt unable to rise.  He approached her, struck deeply by the dignified entreaty for sympathy and pardon that was in her looks.

“I am not well able to rise, dear Charles,” she said, breaking the short silence which had occurred, and extending her hand; “and I suppose you have come to reproach me.  As for me, I have nothing to ask you for now—­nothing to hope for but pardon, and that you will forget me henceforth.  Will you be noble enough to forgive her who was once your Lucy, but who can never be so more?”

The dreadful solemnity, together with the pathetic spirit of tenderness and despair that breathed in these words, caused a pulsation in his heart and a sense of suffocation about his throat that for the moment prevented him from speaking.  He seized her hand, which was placed passively in his, and as he put it to his lips, Lucy felt a warm tear or two fall upon it.  At length he spoke: 

“Oh, why is this, Lucy?” he said; “your appearance has unmanned me; but I see it and feel it all.  I have been sacrificed to ambition, yet I blame you not.”

“No, dear Charles,” she replied; look upon me and then ask yourself who is the victim.”

“But what has happened?” he asked;

“What machinery of hell has been at work to reduce you to this?  Fraud, deceit, treachery have done it.  But, for the sake of God, let me know, as I said, what has occurred since our last interview to occasion this deplorable change—­this rooted sorrow—­this awful spirit of despair that I read in your face?

“Not despair, Charles, for I will never yield to that; but it is enough to say, that a barrier deep as the grave, and which only that can remove, is between us forever in this life.”