He had never before suspected that beneath that calm, gentle, tranquil, unexciteable exterior there beat a heart, there thrilled a soul full of the strongest capabilities, the most earnest aspirations, the most intense imaginings, that ever were awakened by the magic touch of love, into those overwhelming passions, which can tend to middle state, but must lead to the perfect happiness or utter misery of their possessor. But he saw it, he knew it now; and he felt that so soon as the present paroxysm should pass over, she too would feel and know all this likewise. Whether for good or for evil, for weal or for wo, he perceived that he had unlocked for her whom he truly and singly loved, the hitherto sealed fountain of knowledge. And he almost shuddered at the thought of what he had done—he almost wished that he had stifled his own wishes, sacrificed his own hopes. For though impetuous and impulsive, though in some degree warped and perverted, he was not selfish. And when he observed the terrible power which his words had produced upon her, and judged thence of the character and temper of her mind and intellect, a sad suspicion fell upon him that hers was one of those over delicate temperaments, one of those spirits too rarely endowed, too sensitively constituted ever to know again, when once awakened to self-consciousness, that quietude in which alone lies true happiness. Several minutes passed before a word was spoken by either. But gradually the color returned to her lips, to her checks, and the light relumed her beautiful blue eyes, and the tremor passed away from her slight frame; but her face continued motionless, and so calm that its gravity almost amounted to severity. It was not altogether melancholy, it was not at all anger, but it was, what in a harder and less youthful face would have been sternness. Never before had he seen such an expression on any human face—never, assuredly, had hers worn it before. It was the awakening of a new spirit—the consciousness of a new power—the first struggling into life of a great purpose. Her hand lay passive in his grasp, yet he could feel the pulses throbbing to the very tips of those small, rosy fingers, so strongly and tumultuously, that he could not reconcile such evidence of her quick and lively feeling with the fixed tranquillity of the eye which was bent upon his own, with the rigidity of the marble brow. At length, and contrary to what is wont to happen, it was he who first broke silence. “Theresa,” he said, “I have grieved—I have pained—perhaps offended you.” And then she started, as his voice smote her ears, so complete had been the abstraction of her mind, and recovering all her faculties and readiness of mind on the instant,