During the last year of their lives, however, a change had silently, and almost imperceptibly, come over their feelings toward each other. An absence of nearly a twelvemonth with his patron at a foreign court, had in part altered the sentiments of Lorraine from those of a devoted brother to the emotions of love. He left Isabel, when both thought as children; he returned and found her already a woman. During that interval new scenes, new thoughts, new emotions had successively occupied the heart of the page; and though when he came back he was still a boy in years, he had already began to feel the intenser passions of the man. Never had he seen such beauty as burst upon him when Isabel entered the room on his return. It was as if a goddess of olden Greece had been ushered into his presence, as if the inanimate statue of Pygmalion had flushed, all at once, into a breathing being. Lorraine had dreamed of loveliness, but he had never, in his brightest visions, pictured aught so fair. He had expected Isabel to be improved, although he had left her the loveliest being of the riding; but he had not imagined that she would bud forth into a flower of such surpassing, such transcendent beauty. He was awed; he was filled as if with the presence of a divinity, to which he bowed irresistibly, but in strange delight. From that hour the bosom of the warm, high-souled boy, was ruled by a passion that devoured his very existence. But we said Isabel had changed. She too had learned to love, though not her cousin. As yet she scarcely knew it herself; the secret lay hidden in the recesses of her own bosom; and though her heart would beat more wildly, and the blood rush in deeper tints to her cheek, whenever the steed of her lover, the young Lord De Courtenay, was seen approaching her father’s gate, yet the Lady Isabel had never asked herself whence arose her emotion. Perhaps she feared to institute the inquiry. Certain it is, that like every other delicate female, she almost shrank from owning, even to herself, that her affections had strayed from their pure resting-place in her own bosom. It was well for Lorraine’s present, though unfortunate for his future, happiness, that De Courtenay had left the country a few days prior to the page’s return. By this means he was prevented from learning, what, otherwise would have checked his growing affection even in its bud, and suffered to go on in his dreams of love, until the very existence of the endeared object became almost a part of his being.