One morning Prince Castel Forte came to her, evidently dispirited. She asked the cause. "This Scot," sighed he, "is weaning your affection from us, and who knows but he may even carry you far hence?" Corinne was mute for some moments, and then replied, "I protest to you he has never said he loves me."--"You know it, nevertheless; he speaks to you by his life, and his very silence is but an artful plan to attract your notice. What, indeed, can any one say to you that you have not already heard? What kind of praise have you not been offered? But there is something veiled and reined in about the character of Lord Nevil, which will never permit you to judge it wholly as you do ours. You are the most easily known person in the world; but it is just because you voluntarily show yourself as you are, that reserve and mystery both please and govern you. The unknown, be it what it may, has a greater ascendency over you, than all the professions which could be tendered by man." Corinne smiled. "You think then, dear Prince," she said, "that my heart is ungrateful, and my fancy capricious? I believe, however, that Lord Nevil evinces qualities too remarkable for me to flatter myself as their discoverer."--"I allow," rejoined Castel Forte, "that he is high-minded, intelligent, even sensitive, and melancholy above all; but I am much deceived if his pursuits have the least affinity with yours. You cannot perceive this, so thoroughly is he influenced by your presence; but your empire would not last were he absent from you. Obstacles would fatigue a mind warped by the griefs he has undergone, by discouragements which must have impaired the energy of his resolutions; besides, you know what slaves are the generality of English to the manners and habits of their country." These words recalled to the mind of Corinne the painful events of her early years. She sighed, and spoke not; but in the evening she again beheld her lover, and all that remained as the effect of the Prince's counsel was a desire so to enamour Nevil of the varied beauties with which Italy is blest, that he would make it his home for life. With this design she wrote him the following letter. The free life led at Rome excused her, and, much as she might be reproached with a too rash degree of candor, she well knew how to preserve a modest dignity, even in her most independent proceedings. "TO LORD NEVIL. "Dec. 15, 1794.