The youth advanced with slow steps, gathering up the sweeping folds of his cloak as he walked, and sunk down upon the wooden bench placed against the damp brick wall. Lifting his hands and clasping them together, he bowed his face upon them, while his frame shook with imprisoned emotion. The hands clasped over his face gleamed like snow in the dim cell, and they were small and delicate in shape, as a woman's. The dejected and drooping attitude, the downcast face, the shrouded and trembling form, the feminine shame visible through the disguise, awakened a wild hope in his heart. Springing up from his pallet, he eagerly approached the seeming boy, and exclaimed-- "Helen, Helen--have you relented at last? Do you pity and forgive me? Do you indeed love me?" "Ungrateful wretch!" cried a voice far different from Helen's. The drooping head was quickly raised, the cap dashed from the head, and the cloak hurled from the shoulders. "Ungrateful wretch, as false as vile, do you know me now?" "Mittie! is it indeed you?" said Clinton, involuntarily recoiling a few steps from the fiery glance that flashed through her tears. "I am not worthy of this condescension." "Condescension!" repeated she, disdainfully. "Condescension! Yes--you say well. You did not expect me!" continued she, in a tone of withering sarcasm. "I am sorry for your disappointment. I am sorry the gentle Helen did not see fit to leave her downy bed, and warm room, braving the inclemency of the wintry blast, to minister to her waiting lover. It is a wondrous pity." Then changing her accent, and bursting into a strain of the most impassioned emotion-- "Oh, my soul! was it for this I came forth alone, in darkness and stealth, like the felon whose den I sought? Is it on such a being as this, I have wasted such boundless wealth of love? Father, mother, brother, sister--all vainly urged their claims upon my heart. It was marble--it was ice to them. They thought I was made of stone, granite; would to Heaven I were. But you, Clinton; but you breathed upon the rock, you softened, you warmed; and now, wretch, you grind it into powder. You melted the ice--and having drained the waters, you have left a dry and burning channel--here." Mittie pressed her hand upon her heart, with a gesture of pain, and began to traverse wildly the narrow cell; her cloak, which had fallen back from her shoulders, sweeping in the dust. Every passion was wrestling for mastery in her bosom. "Why," she exclaimed, suddenly stopping and gazing fixedly upon him, "why did you make me conscious of this terrible vitality? What motive had you for crossing my path, and like Attila, the destroyer, withering every green blade beneath my feet? I had never wronged you. What motive, I ask, had you for deceiving and mocking me, who so madly trusted, so blindly worshipped?"