seemed to retire as before—­then returned slowly.  A sigh, very faint and trembling; a whisper of which I could not yet distinguish the import, caught my ear—­and after that, there was silence.  Still I waited (oh, how happily and calmly!) to hear the whisper soon repeated, and to hear it better when it next came.  Ere long, for the third time, the footsteps advanced, and the whispering accents sounded again.  I could now hear that they pronounced my name—­once, twice, three times—­very softly and imploringly, as if to beg the answer which I was still too weak to give.  But I knew the voice:  I knew it was Clara’s.  Long after it had ceased, the whisper lingered gently on my ear, like a lullaby that alternately soothed me to slumber, and welcomed me to wakefulness.  It seemed to be thrilling through my frame with a tender, reviving influence—­the same influence which the sunshine had, weeks afterwards, when I enjoyed it for the first time out of doors.

The next sound that came to me was audible in my room; audible sometimes, close at my pillow.  It was the simplest sound imaginable—­nothing but the soft rustling of a woman’s dress.  And yet, I heard in it innumerable harmonies, sweet changes, and pauses minute beyond all definition.  I could only open my eyes for a minute at a time, and even then, could not fix them steadily on anything; but I knew that the rustling dress was Clara’s; and fresh sensations seemed to throng upon me, as I listened to the sound which told me that she was in the room.  I felt the soft summer air on my face; I enjoyed the sweet scent of flowers, wafted on that air; and once, when my door was left open for a moment, the twittering of birds in the aviary down stairs, rang with exquisite clearness and sweetness on my ear.  It was thus that my faculties strengthened, hour by hour, always in the same gradual way, from the time when I first heard the footstep and the whisper outside my chamber-door.

One evening I awoke from a cool, dreamless sleep; and, seeing Clara sitting by my bedside, faintly uttered her name, and moved my wasted hand to take hers.  As I saw the calm, familiar face bending over me; the anxious eyes looking tenderly and lovingly into mine—­as the last melancholy glory of sunset hovered on my bed, and the air, sinking already into its twilight repose, came softly and more softly into the room—­as my sister took me in her arms, and raising me on my weary pillow, bade me for her sake lie hushed and patient a little longer—­the memory of the ruin and the shame that had overwhelmed me; the memory of my love that had become an infamy; and of my brief year’s hope miserably fulfilled by a life of despair, swelled darkly over my heart.  The red, retiring rays of sunset just lingered at that moment on my face.  Clara knelt down by my pillow, and held up her handkerchief to shade my eyes—­“God has given you back to us, Basil,” she whispered, “to make us happier than ever.”  As she spoke, the springs of the grief so long pent up within me were loosened; hot tears dropped heavily and quickly from my eyes; and I wept for the first time since the night of horror which had stretched me where I now lay—­wept in my sister’s arms, at that quiet evening hour, for the lost honour, the lost hope, the lost happiness that had gone from me for ever in my youth!