rapture, they had also sometimes sunk to agony. Even to fold, to seal that letter, seemed a task beyond her strength. It called for no reply, and it was probably the last opportu nity she should ever have of communicating her thoughts to him who seemed to share in, or be a part of them all.

When at length she did close and forward it to Henry Milman, begging him to deliver it to Mr. Bathurst with his own hand, it was as if she had sent away a part of her life.

So much being stated, it will create no surprise that the sight of Lindsay Bathurst's card should have occasioned a sudden revolution in her feelings. From the moment she saw it, she would have staked her life, that whatever might have been the circumstances that had caused Lindsay Bathurst to leave her, they were now removed. Matilda marked the rapture of her eye, and the smile, one of her most beautiful smiles, that like light illumined all her features, and sighed. She saw that the calm, which had marked the last few weeks of her sister's life, was gone, and at that moment she could have execrated the very name of Bathurst. People of the gentlest natures can sometimes hate for others, and Matilda was one of these. No positive injury to herself could have excited in her so deep a feeling of resentment, as the suspicion that her sister had been in some degree trifled with: she could not entirely keep her self from secretly blaming Jeannette, and she did say to her father, when she heard him propose returning Bathurst's visit, that she thought it was unnecessary.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Alas!-how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love!-
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied,—

That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off-

Like ships that have gone down at sea
When heaven was all tranquillity!
A something light as air-a look-

A word unkind or wrongly taken-
Oh! love, that tempests never shook,

A breath, a touch like this hath shaken.-MOORE.

1

MR. LANGHAM had removed early to London on Jeannette's account. To her, all places were the same; but in the peopled world of London, she hoped less exclusively to Occupy the thought and attention of her father and sister, and thereby enjoy a deeper solitude than she could command in the country. Their friends soon flocked around them, and among others Mrs. Crosbie and Sir William Sherrard. It is as difficult to endure troublesome though well-meant kindness, as to repel obtrusive officiousness, and poor Jeannette was often obliged to bear with both: Mrs. Crosbie had always some infallible prescription to recommend that had saved some sixteenth cousin from the grave; and Sir William Sherrard some drive to propose, that would either in itself, he thought, interest her, or some novelty to introduce to her notice, when it was accomplished, to excite her curiosity he gave himself up, indeed, entirely to her, and this with so much delicacy and kindness, that his habitual presence became almost necessary to Mr. Langham, and was wished for by Matilda. Mrs. Crosbie would have been mortified to find him always in Park Lane before her, but that it gave her the opportunity of mentioning the fact, wherever she went, and of prophesying "how it would

end."

:

Mrs. Crosbie was one of those people who are fond of taking "le roman par la queue," as Molière terms it, and of

jumping "de but en blanc au marriage." Her propheciess were received as established facts, on account of her intimacy with the family; and she had peculiar pleasure in descanting on them to Lindsay Bathurst, the first time she met him, because he was a person to whom she rarely felt she had any thing to say. She was a little awed by his mind, though she said, and believed it was by his eyes; if she had been more capable of accurate observation, she might have discovered that those eyes for a moment emitted a stronger and more terrible light than they were wont while she was speaking, and that his faint "Indeed!" was not that of indifference. Mrs. Crosbie only saw that she had a listener, and continued,-" What do you think Lady Everard said to-day, Mr. Bathurst, when I was telling her all about Sir William Sherrard ?"

"I cannot guess."

"Why, that she was very glad of it, for that the baronet had long been to the Langhams, what the finder is to a telescope, and the jackal to the lion; and that it would have been much too bad if they had not let him marry the girl at last."

Lindsay Bathurst laughed, because it was expected of him that he should do so; but his laughter was more bitter than weeping, and his reply, "Very good, very good! 1 really think so too," though uttered in the conventional tone of applause to a good thing, was really spoken in the temporary delirium of newly awakened jealousy. This was a sengation he had not suspected himself capable of experi encing, and the black poison probably on that account ran through his veins with the greater rapidity. He was maddened to the quick by the bare idea of what he had felt; yet, painful as was such a remembrance, it was balm compared to the recollection of what he had written. He found that he had indeed believed himself to have been loved, and he knew that he had committed that belief to paper; the inference, that he made himself a laughing-stock to Jeannette and his triumphant rival, was almost unavoidable.

Some few words of his letter to Jeannette came back to his recollection with tormenting distinctness; it was that passage in which he had begged to be forgotten. If the wealth of the East had been his, he would willingly have given it in exchange for that one little sentence of his own inditing.

In the mean time, Jeannette, finding that he came no more to her father's house as she had expected, and yearning with oppressive and undefinable anxiety to hear his name mentioned, pronounced herself well enough to abandon all invalid habits, and to mingle with the world. Mr. Langham was too much delighted to oppose her wishes, and Matilda's remonstrances, under these unfavouring circumstances, were of course disregarded.

To the sick in heart,-to those who have raised the cup of despair to their lips, and tasted but not quaffed the bitter draught within, a renewal of hope is as the night breeze to a drooping flower, or a sunbeam to those that have sat in darkness. To Jeannette it was health, and joy, and life, and love. She seemed to herself to tread on air, and to be endued with superhuman strength. She resolved to go everywhere and see every body, and she kept her word. For the first few days, in the intervals of visiting and dissipation, she wondered she had not met Lindsay Bathurst; and something like a return of pain occasionally fitted across her mind, but it was momentary. With that perverseness of will which hopeth against all things, she considered the disappointment of one hour a pledge of promise for the next. Yet day after day passed on, and another card, with Mr. Bathurst's name, was the only assurance she had either of his being in town, or of his existence. Sometimes, in the midst of a crowded apartment, she fancied she beheld him in the distance.; and when she did so, she trembled so violently at the thought of his approach, that it became in some degree a relief to find she had been mistaken.

Once, and once only, she imagined she distinguished his voice-his laugh. She turned as the words and laughter were still going on, and found they proceeded from a vulgarlooking young man standing near her, who was talking over the last race at Newmarket. It would scarcely be beyond the truth to say that this discovery was dreadful to her; it is. so truly painful to find the features we love, the qualities we adore, mixed up with baser matter.

At length the shadowings of hope grew fainter, and that aching void which the absence from all we love so infallibly occasions, was beginning to make itself felt, when, in a visit they made to Lady Everard, Jeannette learned that "the strange but agreeable Lindsay Bathurst" had passed two

hours with her ladyship that morning, and that she should see him again at the opera in the evening.

Two hours to Lady Everard and not one half minute to her! This was the painful thought that first filled her mind; but it was soon lost in the determination, that if he were to be at the opera she would see him.

Her father had that day a dinner party, and she knew that neither he nor Matilda could go with her; she therefore proposed to Mr. Langham that she should go with Mrs. Crosbie. But Mrs. Crosbie, when Jeannette arrived at her house, was dining out, and Mrs. Leonard, of whom she next thought, was nursing sick pupils; she was therefore reduced to the alternative of returning home, or of proceeding to the opera alone: she promptly determined on the latter. It was this quickness of decision and fixedness of purpose that rendered Jeannette through her life an ob ject of fearful interest to all who loved her. None who knew her well but also knew, that where the happiness of others was concerned, and at times her own affections, it was useless to oppose her. To them too was known her inability to bear the suffering so invariably attendant on rash and ill-considered actions.

In this instance, the pleasure of success, the finding her self with so little difficulty where she had so much wished to be, at first animated and delighted her. Then came the singing and acting of Pasta in Desdemona, to thrill and to enchant her, and "to fill each pause" of that most bewitching nightingale, the hope, the fevered hope, that she had not come in vain-Nor had she, if to see, merely to see Lindsay Bathurst was her object. At the end of the second act, she saw him in Lady Everard's box, at the opposite side of the house, and even at that distance could feel, as well as see, that his eyes were on her. When she did so, she would have gladly sunk into the earth, for at that moment she felt all the awkwardness of her self-sought position.

In the mean time Lindsay Bathurst continued to gaze on her with the same melancholy interest with which he would have looked on her portrait, and to Lady Everard's inquiry, "Who is with that pretty creature to-night?" he answered so mechanically, as to prove that he made no comment on his own assertion of her seeming to be alone.

"Alone!" said Lady Everard, in the broadest accent of