Almost every evening, for a week, our minister and Phebe Gray took their walk around the pine grove, and always alone. Malina was confined to the house. She had taken cold, Mrs. Gray said, and the night air was bad for her lungs. But often, when her sister was loitering along the river’s bank, happy in the wealth of her newly aroused affections, Malina might be seen at her chamber window, with her cheek languidly supported by a hand which was becoming thinner each day, and gazing earnestly after the two beings dearest to her on earth, but whose happiness she could not witness without emotions that were well nigh killing her. Her mother saw nothing of this. She only knew that Malina was quieter than usual and not very well, that her eyes were heavy and her step languid as she moved around the house. She did not see the heart struggling against itself, the stern principle which grew strong in the contest. She never dreamed of that desolate and lonely sensation which haunted her daughter’s pillow with watchfulness, and made her waking hours a season of trial cruel as the grave. She saw that Malina was strangely affected; true, she smiled still, but it was meekly, sadly, and it seemed as if the music of her laugh was exhausted forever; her eyes grew misty and sorrowful in their expression, and tears would sometimes fill them without apparent cause. Still it was gravely asserted that Malina had only a slight cold, a nervous attack which would go off in a day or two! But there was something in her illness which Phebe could not comprehend; a wish for solitude, and a strange nervous dread of any thing like intimate conversation with herself, which prevented an acknowledgment of her own deep causes of happiness. Her sensitive modesty made her desirous of some encouragement to unburden her heart of its wealth of hope even to her sister, and when she saw that Malina shunned her, that her eyes had a wandering and estranged look whenever they turned upon her face, she felt checked and almost repulsed in her confidence. If any thing could have disturbed the pure happiness which reigned in her bosom, it would have been this extraordinary mood in one who had from childhood shared every thought and wish almost as soon as it was formed. It had a power to disturb, though it could not entirely destroy the tranquillity of her mind. “I will talk with her about it to-night,” murmured Phebe, as she opened her chamber door one evening, after a long conversation with Mr. Mosier in the portico. “I wish, though, she would ask some question, or even look curious to know what keeps us together so much; I little thought to have kept a secret from Malina so long.”