had been made at the moment when the certainty of entire separation from the object of her affection had made her utterly regardless of her future fate. She neither accepted nor rejected him; her father managed the whole matter, and she had culpably sacrificed the peace of both by thus weakly yielding to despair. Some months after her marriage, the news of her lover’s death threw her into a paroxysm of grief and self-reproach, and taught the husband that he had won the hand only, while the heart was still another’s. Her feelings were too pure, and her mind too deeply imbued with truth, to be satisfied with the deception which her silence had practised upon her husband; and as her inert and timid temper had been the cause of her error, she determined to devote her life to its expiation. But she mistook penance for expiation. Instead of resolutely stifling her regrets for the past, and applying herself to the fulfilment of her duties—instead of remembering that duty to her husband required the oblivion of former affections—she vainly fancied that by giving herself up to sorrow, she should make a proper atonement for her fault; and she therefore sought not to check the ravages which grief was making in her health. For seven long years did the Colonel watch over the failing strength and minister to the daily comforts of her whose heart was buried in the grave of another. She esteemed him, she was grateful to him, she loved him with sisterly affection; but she remembered the thrill which a dearer voice had once sent to her heart, and because her husband could awaken none of those fervent feelings of youthful passion, she rejected the peace which might yet have grown up in the calm atmosphere of domestic life, and cherished her unhappiness like a bosom friend. She died at length in her husband’s arms, lamenting, when too late, the weakness and morbid sensibility which had led her to waste her life in pining after unsubstantial bliss, when true contentment might have been the daily companion of her existence.