In the broad porch, around every chaste column of which twined jessamine, rose, or honeysuckle, filling the air with a delicious fragrance beyond the perfumer’s art to imitate, moved to and fro, with measured step and inverted thought, Edward Markland, the wealthy owner of all the fair landscape spreading for acres around the elegant mansion he had built as the home of his beloved ones.

“Edward.”  Love’s sweetest music was in the voice that uttered his name, and love’s purest touch in the hand that lay upon his arm.

A smile broke over the grave face of Markland, as he looked down tenderly into the blue eyes of his Agnes.

“I never tire of this,” said the gentle-hearted wife, in whose spirit was a tuneful chord for every outward touch of beauty; “it looks as lovely now as yesterday; it was as lovely yesterday as the day my eyes first drank of its sweetness.  Hush!”

A bird had just alighted on a slender spray a few yards distant, and while yet swinging on the elastic bough, poured forth a gush of melody.

“What a thrill of gladness was in that song, Edward!  It was a spontaneous thank-offering to Him, without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground; to Him who clothes the fields in greenness, beautifies the lily, and provides for every creature its food in season.  And this reminds me;” she added in a changed and more sobered voice, “that our thank-offering for infinite mercies lies in deeds, not heart-impulses nor word-utterances.  I had almost forgotten poor Mrs. Elder.”

And as Mrs. Markland said this, she withdrew her hand from her husband’s arm, and glided into the house, leaving his thoughts to flow back into the channel from which they had been turned.

In vain for him did Nature clothe herself, on that fair day, in garments of more than usual beauty.  She wooed the owner of Woodbine Lodge with every enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration.  Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own.  And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured in his imagination, the pace of Edward Markland quickened; and all the changing aspects of the man showed him to be in the ardour of a newly-forming life-purpose.

It was just five years since he commenced building Woodbine Lodge and beautifying its surroundings.  The fifteen preceding years were spent in the earnest pursuit of wealth, as the active partner in a large mercantile establishment.  Often, during these busy fifteen years, had he sighed. for ease and “elegant leisure;” for a rural home far away from the jar, and strife, and toil incessant by which he was surrounded.  Beyond this he had no aspiration.  That “lodge in the wilderness,” as he sometimes vaguely called it, was the bright ideal of his fancy.  There, he would often say to himself—­