And yet there are some things that puzzle you in Nelly. You have found accidentally, in one of her treasured books,--a book that lies almost always on her dressing-table,--a little withered flower with its stem in a slip of paper, and on the paper the initials of--your old friend Frank. You recall, in connection with this, her indisposition to talk of him on the first evening of your return. It seems--you scarce know why--that these are the tokens of something very like a leaning of the heart. It does occur to you that she too may have her little casket of loves; and you try one day very adroitly to take a look into this casket. ----You will learn later in life that the heart of a modest, gentle girl is a very hard matter for even a brother to probe; it is at once the most tender and the most unapproachable of all fastnesses. It admits feeling by armies, with great trains of artillery,--but not a single scout. It is as calm and pure as polar snows; but deep underneath, where no footsteps have gone, and where no eye can reach but one, lies the warm and the throbbing earth. Make what you will of the slight, quivering blushes, and of the half broken expressions,--more you cannot get. The love that a delicate-minded girl will tell is a short-sighted and outside love; but the love that she cherishes without voice or token is a love that will mould her secret sympathies, and her deepest, fondest yearnings, either to a quiet world of joy, or to a world of placid sufferance. The true voice of her love she will keep back long and late, fearful ever of her most prized jewel,--fearful to strange sensitiveness; she will show kindness, but the opening of the real floodgates of the heart, and the utterance of those impassioned yearnings which belong to its nature, come far later. And fearful, thrice fearful is the shock, if these flow out unmet! That deep, thrilling voice, bearing all the perfume of the womanly soul in its flow, rarely finds utterance; and if uttered vainly,--if called out by tempting devices, and by a trust that is abused,--desolate indeed is the maiden heart, widowed of its chastest thought! The soul shrinks affrighted within itself. Like a tired bird lost at sea, fluttering around what seem friendly boughs, it stoops at length, and finding only cold, slippery spars, with no bloom and no foliage,--its last hope gone,--it sinks to a wild ocean grave! Nelly--and the thought brings a tear of sympathy to your eye--must have such a heart; it speaks in every shadow of her action. And this very delicacy seems to lend her a charm that would make her a wife to be loved and honored.