"When the door closed upon her retreating form, I sat down by the side of Eglantine, and wept. The fear that I had unjustly accused the innocent, the possibility, nay, the probability that she was guilty, the loss of the first pledge of plighted love, indefinite terrors for the future, a dim shade of superstition brooding over the whole, all conspired to make me gloomy and desponding. We were all unhappy. Ronald tried to laugh at my sadness, and promised me 'gems from the mine, and pearls from the ocean,' to indemnify me for my loss, yet I watched every change of his expressive countenance, and knew he thought deeply and painfully on the subject. The strange suspicion which had risen in my mind the preceding night, with regard to Eglantine's feelings towards him, revived when I saw them together, and I wondered I had not observed before the fluctuations of her complexion, and the agitation of her manner whenever he addressed her. He had always treated her with the kindness of a brother--that kindness now made me unhappy. I was becoming suspicious, jealous, and self-distrustful, with a settled conviction that some strange barrier existed to my union with Ronald, a destiny too bright and too beautiful to be realized in this world of dreams and shadows. My mother was firm in her belief of the guilt of Alice, who had never been a favourite of hers. Perhaps I lavished upon her too many indulgences, which displeased my mother's soberer judgment. She forbade all intercourse with her, all mention of her name, but she was ever present to my imagination; sometimes the shameless ingrate and accomplished deceiver, at others the eloquent pleader of her outraged innocence. One day Eglantine came to me, and laid her hand on mine with a look of unspeakable dismay-- "'I have heard,' said she, 'that Alice is dying. Let us go to her, Laura, and save her, if it be not too late.'