“My heart talks to you. Ah! I wish it could say all I felt. I wish it could make poetry like you, or that words were music--I would never speak to you in anything else. I was so delighted to learn music, because when I played I seemed to be talking to you. I am sure that whoever invented music did it because he loved dearly and wanted to say so. I said ‘_he_,’ but I think it was a woman. Was it?” “The Greeks I told you of, and whose life was music, thought it was a god.” “Ah, but you say the Greeks made Love a god. Were they wicked for it?” “Our own God above is Love,” said Ernest, seriously, “as our own poets have said and sung. But it is a love of another nature--divine, not human. Come, we will go within, the air grows cold for you.” They entered, his arm round her waist. The room smiled upon them its quiet welcome; and Alice, whose heart had not half vented its fulness, sat down to the instrument still to “talk love” in her own way. But it was Saturday evening. Now every Saturday, Maltravers received from the neighbouring town the provincial newspaper--it was his only medium of communication with the great world. But it was not for that communication that he always seized it with avidity, and fed on it with interest. The county in which his father resided bordered on the shire in which Ernest sojourned, and the paper included the news of that familiar district in its comprehensive columns. It therefore satisfied Ernest’s conscience and soothed his filial anxieties to read from time to time that “Mr. Maltravers was entertaining a distinguished party of friends at his noble mansion of Lisle Court;” or that “Mr. Maltravers’s foxhounds had met on such a day at something copse;” or that, “Mr. Maltravers, with his usual munificence, had subscribed twenty guineas to the new county gaol.”... And as now Maltravers saw the expected paper laid beside the hissing urn, he seized it eagerly, tore the envelope, and hastened to the well-known corner appropriated to the paternal district. The very first words that struck his eye were these: ALARMING ILLNESS OF MR. MALTRAVERS. “We regret to state that this exemplary and distinguished gentleman was suddenly seized on Wednesday night with a severe spasmodic affection. Dr. ------ was immediately sent for, who pronounced it to be gout in the stomach. The first medical assistance from London has been summoned. “Postscript.--We have just learned, in answer to our inquiries at Lisle Court, that the respected owner is considerably worse: but slight hopes are entertained of his recovery. Captain Maltravers, his eldest son and heir, is at Lisle Court. An express has been despatched in search of Mr. Ernest Maltravers, who, involved by his high English spirit in some dispute with the authorities of a despotic government, had suddenly disappeared from Gottingen, where his extraordinary talents had highly distinguished him. He is supposed to be staying at Paris.”