She is not unmindful of those old-fashioned virtues of cleanliness and of order which give an air of quiet, and which secure content. Your wants are all anticipated: the fire is burning brightly; the clean hearth flashes under the joyous blaze; the old elbow-chair is in its place. Your very unworthiness of all this haunts you like an accusing spirit, and yet penetrates your heart with a new devotion toward the loved one who is thus watchful of your comfort. She is gentle,--keeping your love, as she has won it, by a thousand nameless and modest virtues which radiate from her whole life and action. She steals upon your affections like a summer wind breathing softly over sleeping valleys. She gains a mastery over your sterner nature by very contrast, and wins you unwittingly to her lightest wish. And yet her wishes are guided by that delicate tact which avoids conflict with your manly pride; she subdues by seeming to yield. By a single soft word of appeal she robs your vexation of its anger; and, with a slight touch of that fair hand, and one pleading look of that earnest eye, she disarms your sternest pride. She is kind,--shedding her kindness as heaven sheds dew. Who indeed could doubt it?--least of all you, who are living on her kindness day by day, as flowers live on light? There is none of that officious parade which blunts the point of benevolence; but it tempers every action with a blessing. If trouble has come upon you, she knows that her voice, beguiling you into cheerfulness, will lay your fears; and as she draws her chair beside you, she knows that the tender and confiding way with which she takes your hand, and looks up into your earnest face, will drive away from your annoyance all its weight. As she lingers, leading off your thought with pleasant words, she knows well that she is redeeming you from care, and soothing you to that sweet calm which such home and such wife can alone bestow. And in sickness,--sickness that you almost covet for the sympathy it brings,--that hand of hers resting on your fevered forehead, or those fingers playing with the scattered locks, are more full of kindness than the loudest vaunt of friends; and when your failing strength will permit no more, you grasp that cherished hand with a fulness of joy, of thankfulness, and of love, which your tears only can tell. She is good; her hopes live where the angels live. Her kindness and gentleness are sweetly tempered with that meekness and forbearance which are born of Faith. Trust comes into her heart as rivers come to the sea. And in the dark hours of doubt and foreboding you rest fondly upon her buoyant Faith, as the treasure of your common life; and in your holier musings you look to that frail hand, and that gentle spirit, to lead you away from the vanities of worldly ambition to the fulness of that joy which the good inherit. ----Is Laura Dalton such an one? VIII. _A Broken Hope._