was but one object visible-one fearful thought defined" Frederic! Could his form but now

appear amidst this throng, what human protestations could convince him that I am faithful still?"

This was the last, as it was the first, moment of her married life which was willingly devoted to the remembrance of her lover. She had taken a desperate step for him, the result remained with Providence, and the intervening time was to be claimed by the duties of her new state. With these the thought of Frederic was incompatible. She dared not dwell upon the joy it had been in the midst of her desolation. It must be banished; and, as an indulged and definite object, it was banished. But, though the shade of fear appeared not, the apprehension, the tremor, convulsed her still. Her expression underwent another change. It was more deathlike, but it was more restless." It was seeking constantly somewhat that it dreaded to find. It looked on the spectator with an appeal for shelter from herself.

The life of a noble lady, in its worldly career, accorded little with the retiring virtue and

shrinking sensibility of Teresina. Her appearance and youth, when contrasted with the Marchese, could not fail, in such a land as Italy, to surround her with gallantry which was odious and irrepressible. The pattern which she set to the less scrupulous was remarked with ridicule and resented with injury, and, when she received not the mock credit of having found for her husband a feeling new to nature, she was whispered to have at least the merit of constancy and caution in her engagements elsewhere. Such shafts as these, however unmerited, could not drop harmlessly, for the very purity of her bosom only caused a more vivid consciousness of somewhat within it which dared not see the light. moment her secret seemed discovered throb of her heart was a confession of guilt.

Every

every

If her situation was painful amongst her equals, before the public it was harrowing. If her splendid equipage passed the streets, her declining head turned not to the right or to the left, from apprehension of whose reproachful glance might be fixed upon her. If she knelt for relief before the altar, she dared not raise her

eyes, for fear of whose indignant form might interpose. And when she returned exhausted in soul to her palazzo, that look, that form, which first had met her there which there had gained dominion of her deepest love - how could she shun them? How, except in madness !

The Marchese, who observed with vigilant kindness every turn of her behaviour, and saw its motives no less correctly than he had done at first, became aware that her serenity of mind was not to be restored by society, or by remaining in a scene of painful associations. She had never visited his possessions in the mountains, and his proposal to remove thither was received with an eagerness which showed too well her piteous yearning for repose. For the first time, her eyes looked back over the desolate Campagna, upon the sinking domes and towers of her native city. If she sighed, it was to, think that it contained no joy, no thing that she regretted, and that her business was to let it fade from her memory as it did from her sight.

When the declining sun shone red upon her

mountain path, there was nothing to remind her of her scene of trials but the summit of Soracte, which had formed the loftiest point of her wondering view, and which now lay behind her, and a backward gleam of the Tiber winding, like a stream of fire, through the distant plain, as though to bear her last farewell.

At length the crags of the Apennine, with their tortuous stems and naked roots of golden chesnut, their deep bronze clumps of impervious ilex, their crimson arbutus, and all their nameless hues of autumnal foliage, closed up the last outlet to a world beyond them. The ancient castellated chateau crowned a steep summit, that shot up from forests bounded only by mountains without end. The boar and the buck, it would have seemed, might have dwelt there for ever undisturbed by the foot of man, had not a few scattered columns of smoke ascended from the now grey valley, to indicate the burning of the leaves for purposes of husbandry. The last blaze of the sun likewise, which caught a few of the loftiest points, was refracted in one direction by some glittering

white monastery; in another, by some lonely

VOL. I.

C

penitential cell. To those who must suffer in secret, it is a consolation to suffer in solitude, and already she felt her heart relieved as from bonds that would not suffer it to swell with its griefs.

The difference in every thing around, from her previous mode of life, was perhaps the source of her ability to exist on. The spacious halls, instead of the rich Corinthian sculpture she had left, brought recollections only of the rude Goth, the feudal warrior, and the hunter of the boar. For statue and picture there were the piled implements of the chase, and the carved oaken panel; for the light balcony there was the deep sombre recess. The retainers had a bold romantic bearing, like the mountains that bred them, and the polished Marchese of the capital was converted into the more noble chieftain of the wilds. The beautiful and the elegant had become the awful and the sublime, and all things harmonized with her days of sacrifice, as though to aid her through them.

The Marchese had been all his life an enthusiast of the chase, and the chief events in