It was strange that, quick as she was and clever, even beyond her sex’s wonted penetration, where matters of the heart are concerned, Theresa never suspected that the old cavalier had long perceived and sanctioned their growing affection. But idolizing Jasper as she did, and believing him all that was high and generous and noble, seeing that all his external errors tended to the side of rash, hasty impulse, never to calculation or deceit, she saw every thing, as it were, through his eyes, and was easily induced by him to believe that all his father’s kindness and father-like attention to her slightest wish, arose only from his love for her lost parent, and compassion for her sad abandonment; nay, further, he insisted that the least suspicion of their mutual passion would lead to their instant and eternal separation. It was lamentable, that a being so bright, so excellent as she, believing that such was the case, and bound as she was by the closest obligations, the dearest gratitude to that good old man, should have consented, even for a moment, to deceive him, much more to frustrate his wishes in a point so vital. But she was very young—she had been left without the training of a mother’s watchful heart, without the supervision of a mother’s earnest eye—she was endowed marvelously with those extreme sensibilities which are invariably a part of that high nervous organization, ever connected with poetical genius; she loved Jasper with a devotedness, a singleness, and at the same time a consuming heat of passion, which scarcely could be believed to exist in one so calm, so self-possessed, and so innocently-minded—and, above all, she had none else in the wide world on whom to fix her affections. And the boy profited by this; and with the sharpness of an intellect, which, if far inferior to hers in depth and real greatness, was as far superior to it in worldly selfishness and instinctive shrewdness, played upon her nervous temperament, till he could make each chord of her secret soul thrill to his touch, as if they had been the keys of a stringed instrument. The hearts of the young who love, must ever, must naturally resent all interference of the aged, who would moderate or oppose their love, as cold, intrusive tyranny; and thus, with plausible and artful sophistry, abetted by the softness of her treacherous heart, too willing to be deceived, he first led her to regard his father as opposed to the wishes of that true love, which, for all the great poet knew or had heard, “never did run smooth,” and thence to resent that opposition as unkind, unjust, tyrannical; and thence—alas! for Theresa!—to deceive the good old man, her best friend on earth—ay, to deceive herself.