know a language save that which breathed in my mother’s voice, but there was something earnest and thrilling in the impassioned word which Mr. Mosier was pouring into the ear of Phebe Gray, which checked my childish playfulness, and made me turn wonderingly to Malina. She was standing as I had seen her last, with her finger still held up as if to check my mirth, but there was no look of gleeful mischief in her eyes nor a vestige of color in her face. She stood motionless, white, and like a thing of marble, save that her eyes were bright and filled with a look of such agony as made my young heart sink within me. At last Phebe spoke, and her voice was so faint and soft as she leaned gently toward her companion, that the words were lost in the rushing sound of the waterfall; their broken melody and the rose tinge that flooded her face and neck, were all the tokens by which their meaning could be guessed; but the young clergyman must have heard her more distinctly, for his face lighted up with an expression of happiness that made his usually quiet features brilliant almost beyond any thing human. His arm trembled as he drew the young girl to his bosom, and with murmuring words of tenderness pressed his lips to her forehead. Phebe neither shrunk from his embrace nor resisted his caress, but the crimson flood swelled more deeply over her neck, and when his arm was withdrawn from her waist, her little hand timidly sought his and nestled itself in the clasp of his fingers, as if it sought his protection from the very solitude which she believed had alone witnessed her modest confession, a confession which made her tremble and blush with a tumult of strange sensations—all pure as the sigh of an angel, but startling to a young creature who had been taught to think every warm impulse almost a sin against Heaven.