Lucilla threw herself into her lover’s arms, and, as she kissed him, murmured, “Ah, if I could make thee happy!” The next day Godolphin departed for Rome. Lucilla was more dejected at his departure than she had been even in his earliest absence. The winter was now slowly approaching, and the weather was cold and dreary. That year it was unusually rainy and tempestuous, and as the wild gusts howled around her solitary home--how solitary now!--or she heard the big drops hurrying down on the agitated lake, she shuddered at her own despondent thoughts, and dreaded the gloom and loneliness of the lengthened night. For the first time since she had lived with Godolphin she turned, but disconsolately, to the company of books. Works of all sorts filled their home, but the spell that once spoke to her from the page was broken. If the book was not of love, it possessed no interest;--if of love, she thought the description both tame and false. No one ever painted love so as fully to satisfy another:--to some it is too florid--to some too commonplace; the god, like other gods, has no likeness on earth, and every wave on which the star of passion beams, breaks the lustre into different refractions of light. As one day she was turning listlessly over some books that had been put aside by Godolphin in a closet, and hoping to find one that contained, as sometimes happened, his comments or at least his marks--she was somewhat startled to find among them several volumes which she remembered to have belonged to her father. Godolphin had bought them after Volktman’s death, and put them by as relics of his singular friend, and as samples of the laborious and selfwilled aberration of the human intellect. Few among these works could Lucilla comprehend, for they were chiefly in other tongues than the only two with which she was acquainted. But some, among which were manuscripts by her father, beautifully written, and curiously ornamented (some of the chief works on the vainer sciences are only to be found in manuscript), she could contrive to decipher by a little assistance from her memory, in recalling the signs and hieroglyphics which her father had often explained to her, and, indeed, caused her to copy out for him in his calculations. Always possessing an untaxed and unquestioned belief in the astral powers, she now took some interest in reading of their mysteries. Her father, secretly, perhaps, hoping to bequeath his name to the gratitude of some future Hermes, had in his manuscripts reduced into a system many scattered theories of others, and many dogmas of his own. Over these, for they were simpler and easier than the crabbed and mystical speculations in the printed books, she more especially pored; and she was not sorry at finding fresh reasons for her untutored adoration of the stars and apparitions of the heavens.