"One evening, I think I was about eight or nine years old, she took me in her arms, and told me, with many tears, that Mr. Clyde, the good and kind gentleman whom I loved so much, had offered to be a father to me, and was going to take us both to a pleasant home in the country, where I could run about in the green fields, and be free as the birds of the air. She told me that perhaps my own father was living, but that he had left her so long their union was annulled by law, and that she had a right to marry another, and that she did so that I might have a father and protector. She explained this simply, so that I understood it all, and I understood too why she wished me to drop my own name and take that of her future husband. It was associated with so much sorrow and wrong, it was painful to her ear, and Mr. Clyde wished me to adopt his own. He was a good and honorable man, and I cherish his memory with reverence and gratitude. If the fissure in my mother's heart was not healed, it closed, and tears no longer dripped through. "Our country home was pleasant and comfortable, and I revelled in the delights of nature, with all the wild passion of a bird let loose from the imprisoning cage. I went to school,--I was in the world of action,--the energies of incipient manhood awoke and struggled in my bosom. We remained about two years in this rural residence, situated in the western part of New York, when Mr. Clyde was called to attend a dying father, who lived in this town, Gabriella, not very far from the little cottage in the woods where I first knew you. He took my mother and myself with him, for she was in feeble health, and he thought the journey would invigorate her. It did not. A child of sunny France, she languished under the bleaker New England skies. She was never able to return; and he who came to bury a father, soon laid a beloved wife by the side of the aged. My heart went down to the grave with her, and it was long before its resurrection. My step-father was completely crushed by the blow, for he loved her as such a woman deserved to be loved, and mourned as few mourn. He remained with his aged mother in the old homestead, which she refused to leave, and I was placed in the academy under the charge of Mr. Regulus, where I first knew and loved you, my own sister, my darling, beloved Gabriella." If I had loved Richard before, how much more did I love him now, after hearing his simple and affecting history, so similar to my own. As I had never loved him otherwise than as a brother, the revelation which had caused such a terrible revulsion in his feelings was a sacred sanction to mine. His nerves still vibrated from the shock, and he could not pronounce the word sister without a tremulousness of voice which betrayed internal agitation.