Was Ernest in love with Mary Allison? Who can tell? surely he was too unpresuming, too calm, too free from jealousy to be in love. Yet what meant his eager watchfulness over her every look and word, his keen perception of her every impulse, his deep devotion to her every wish? It was most strange, and yet might not a warm fraternal affection for one who had taken the place of his dead sister in his heart, account for all his feelings? Such was Ernest’s belief, and if he deceived himself, his was the punishment as well as the error. One after another, the beautiful daughters of Mr. Allison were wedded, until only Mary, the lovely Mary, whose very changefulness of temper formed one of her brightest charms, alone was left. From her sixteenth year Mary had received the homage of flattery and affection. Some had wooed her for her fortune, some for her gayety, some for her warm-heartedness, but all had alike been unsuccessful. When questioned as to her motives for this indiscriminate coldness, she would only laugh, and toss back her golden locks with a look of mischievous mirth that seemed the index of a light and unfettered heart. Utterly free from the coquetry which can deliberately win hearts but to wound them, she yet loved admiration, and could seldom resist the temptation of making herself agreeable. Indeed she could scarcely avoid making conquests, for her usual sweetness of manner was sufficient of itself to attract all who came within its influence. As Miss Edgeworth has beautifully expressed it, “even from the benevolence of her own disposition she derived the means of giving pain, as the bee is said to draw the venom of its sting from its own honey.” Too sensitive for frivolous coquetry, Mary was in far more danger from those sentimental flirtations which are so fascinating to the romantic and the imaginative, and often so fatal to the peace of those who indulge in them. Few women—I mean warm-hearted, high-souled women—have escaped the influence of these “opium dreams of too much youth and reading,” as they are contemptuously called by the worldly and the cold. Few but have, at the early dawn of womanhood, cherished a pure and passionless affection, which the world may have sneered at as “Platonic,” and the prudent may have censured as indiscreet, but which was a source of infinite happiness while it endured, and which, perhaps, by the very anguish of its dissolution, afforded the best of all discipline for the future trials of the heart. Yet, like all other exquisite pleasures in this changing world, such joy is only to be bought at the price of future pain. Rarely does such an attachment terminate without suffering—rarely does that passionless dream fade into the splendors of a brighter reality—rarely does the heart awake from its trance of sublimated feeling to find loftier and sweeter impulses in actual life and perfect love.