from its rich lustrous light in a mature and healthy woman. Was it the contemplation of this change that brought so sad a cloud on the brow of lovely Marian Hawkwood, so dull a gloom into her speaking eye, so dead a paleness on the ripe damask of her cheek? Sad indeed always is such contemplation—sorrowful and grave thoughts must it awake in the minds of those who think the least, to revisit a fair well-known scene which they have quitted in the festal flush of summer, when all the loveliness they dwelt on so fondly is flown or flying. It brings a chill upon the spirit like that which touches the last guest “who treads alone Some banquet hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all save he departed.” It wakes a passing anguish like that which thrills to the heart’s core of him who, after years of wandering in a foreign clime, returns to find the father whom he left still in the prime of vigorous and active manhood, bowed, bent, gray-haired and paralytic; the mother, whom he saw at their last parting glorious in summer beauty, withered and wrinkled, and bereft of every trace of former comeliness. All this it does, at times to all, to the reflective always—the solitary contemplation of the decaying year. Yet it was not this alone, it was not this _at all_, that blanched the cheek and dimmed the glance of Marian, as, at a very early hour of the morning, she was sauntering alone, with downcast eyes, and slow uncertain gait, beside the margin of the stream in the warm, sheltered garden; for she did not, in truth, seem to contemplate at all the face of external nature, or so much as to note the changes which had taken place during her absence; yet were those changes very great, and nowhere probably so strongly marked as on the very spot where she was wandering; for when she stood there last, to cull a nosegay ere she parted, the whole of that fair nook was glowing with the brightest colors, and redolent with the most fragrant perfumes, while hundreds of feathered songsters were filling every brake and thicket with bursts of joyous melody; and now only a few, the hardiest of the late autumnal flowers, displayed their scattered blossoms, and those, too, crisp and faded among sere leaves and withered branches; while for the mellow warblings of the thrush and blackbird nothing was heard except the feeble piping of a solitary robin, mixed with the wailing rush of the swollen streamlet. For nearly an hour she walked to and fro buried in deep and melancholy silence, and thinking, as it seemed from her air and gestures, most profoundly—occasionally she paused for a few seconds in her walk to and fro, and stood still gazing abstractedly on some spot in the withered herbage, on some pool of the brooklet, with her mind evidently far away; and once or twice she clasped her hands and wrung them passionately, and sighed very deeply. While she was yielding thus