She granted the wished for promise, and a few days afterward we quitted the château. The following year we repaired, as usual, to my aunt’s, and had scarcely exchanged the greeting caresses, before, longing to satisfy my impatient curiosity, I seized my aunt’s hand with an air of gravity whose cause she did not comprehend. I conducted her to the gallery, and pausing before my favorite picture, “Good aunt,” I said, “now is the time to fulfill your promise!” She regarded me, surprised and smiling, and deferred only until that evening the recital of the history so much desired. Orders were issued to prepare the gallery for our reception, and in the presence of the portrait of Wilhelmine de Cernan, I learned the strange misfortunes of her life. They appeared to me so interesting that I have since endeavored to find further details to fill the deficiency of my memory; and it is her history which, in my turn, I am about to relate to you. Wilhelmine de Cernan, reared by her mother in the country, had grown to girlhood in the seclusion of her own family, and the intimacy of a few cherished friends. Her simple tastes prompted her to love retirement, and her disposition, naturally a melancholy one, shrunk timidly from much which usually makes the happiness of women. The pleasures of society, those gay balls and animated assemblies youth is prone to love so intensely, had for her no attractions. Her mother, by whom she was idolized, never imagined that this tendency of character could injure her daughter; she therefore never sought to subdue it, and only throve to inculcate those doctrines of piety which had formed the basis of her own education. Religion appeared to the spirit of Wilhelmine robed with all its noblest and sublimest coloring; and its mystical beauty tinged for her the most trivial details of life. She seemed almost like an angel, who claimed communion every day, every moment, with heaven. God and her mother! in these two thoughts lay all her existence.