"I told you how Colonel Randolph doated on his daughter; truly, none ever loved Aletheia with a common love. When he was released from the duties of his high office, it was one of his greatest pleasures to walk, or ride with me, that he might talk to me of her. One morning he came in with a packet of letters from England, and, taking me by the arm, drew me out into the garden, that he might tell me some news, which, he said, gave him exceeding joy. The letters announced the arrival of the son of an old friend of his, who had just succeeded to his title and estates, the young Marquis of L----, and further communicated, in the most unreserved manner, that his object in coming to the M---- was to make Aletheia his wife, if he could win her to himself; he had long loved her, and had only delayed his offer till he could install her in his lordly castle with all the honors of his station. To see this union accomplished, Colonel Randolph said, had been his one wish since both had played as children at his feet, and he now believed the desired consummation was at hand. Aletheia's consent was alone required, and there seemed no reason to doubt it would be given, for there was not, he asserted, in all England, one more worthy of her, by every noble gift of mind, than the high-born, generous-hearted L----. "Why, indeed, should she not, at once, accept the brilliant destiny carved out for her!--I did not doubt it more than the exulting father, and I heard my doom fixed in the same senseless state of calm with which the criminal who knows his guilt and its penalty, hears the sentence of his execution. I had long known this hour must come; and what had I now to do but gather, as it were, a shroud round my tortured soul, and, like the Cæsars, die decently to all earthly happiness! Even in that tremendous hour, I had a consciousness of the dignity of suffering--suffering, that is, which comes from the height of heaven above, and not from the depths of crime below! I resolved that the lamp of my life's joy should go out without a sigh audible to human ears, save hers alone, who had lit that pure flame in the black night of my existence. "Lilias, I enter into no detail of what I felt in that momentous crisis, for you have no woman's heart if you have not understood it, in its uttermost extent of misery. One thought, however, stood up pre-eminent in that chaos of suffering--the conviction that I must not see Aletheia Randolph again, or the very powers of my mind would give way in the struggle that must ensue. This thought, and one other--one solitary gleam of dreary comfort, that alone relieved the great darkness which had fallen upon me, were all that seemed distinct in my mind: that last mournful consolation was the resolution taken along with the vow to see her no more, that ere I passed forever from her memory, she should know what was the love with which I loved her.