Here at once were scattered all her most cherished hopes. She had hitherto looked upon life as a bright and happy dream, thinking but to wake from it when the grave should have opened to her dazzled sight the glories of our heavenly home. But now the veil was torn aside, and cold deceit was placed before her view, which had hitherto only looked on love and joy. To be thus suddenly awoke from the beautiful but fallacious dreamings which our first love ever weaves around us: to have the world with all its selfishness thrust thus rudely upon our shuddering hearts, is hard indeed. No shock of after years can ever equal its intensity. All the ties and pleasant memories that our past life has created are at once severed; the past has no connection with the present; one is all dream, the other stern and rugged truth. It is not, then, to be wondered at, that so frail a thing as a woman’s heart, under the feeling of her first and only love, should sink beneath the disruption of all her fondest wishes. The idol she worshiped has been unsanctified; its altar desecrated, and her heart lies shattered at its feet, a useless sacrifice. And the same spirit which led her to give her hand to another, to hide from the common gaze her hopeless sufferings, was silently, but surely, undermining her health, and sowing the seeds of that remorseless disease which in a few months removed her broken spirit from its earthly travail. . . . . . . The disease rapidly assumed a more alarming aspect. Physicians were called in; they advised a change of climate, but at the same time feared that nothing could save her life. She felt that hope was past, and refused to leave her home. For the few months she lived, Ernest never left her. The days were passed in performing acts of the tenderest solicitude, and the nights in feverish slumbers, whose visions showed him his Adeline in all her former loveliness, and pictured forth scenes of deep and holy love, such as might have been his, had Heaven so willed it, only to sink him deeper in despair by the contrast the waking truth presented.