different stages; while all the time she knew it was herself who had coldly and deliberately dried up the fountain of hope and joy, and love, which had sent such roses to her cheek and sunbeams to her eye. She sometimes trembled in the darkness of night, at the possibility that Grace might die, under the regimen of this imaginary disease; and then a voice whispered in hollow murmurs, in her ears, "Thou shalt sleep no more, for thou hast murdered sleep." But in day's broad light a witness to Roland's abstraction, anxiety and gloom, she steeled her conscience, in reflecting on the necessity of the act. Let not Grace be condemned, as too weak and yielding, as too blind an instrument in the hands of another. Her education had been peculiar, and her natural disposition was extremely sensitive and timid. The first years of her life had been passed in terror and sorrow--terror for her father's cruelty, and sorrow for her mother's woe. Everything around her was tumultuous and fearful, and she learned to shudder at the awful manifestations of evil passions, before she knew them by name. Transplanted to a scene, where everything breathed of peace and silence, where industry, neatness, and order were heaven's first laws, where the voice of dissension was unheard, and the storms of passion unfelt, her spirit had been so hushed and subdued, her sensibilities so repressed, and her energies held down, she moved along her daily path a piece of beautiful and exquisite mechanism, but whose most powerful springs had never been touched. It is true she loved the kind and gentle Shakers, but it was with a tranquil feeling of gratitude and trust. The visit of Roland Gray acted as an electrical communication between her and the world to which he belonged. It seemed to her it must be inhabited by angels; and when Mr. Worthington came and induced her benefactor to resign her to his care, she welcomed the change as into the garden of Eden. In the seclusion of a school, her timidity still induced her to shrink within herself; in the companionship of Lucy, she felt awe-struck and abashed; but Roland came, and then she realized the paradise of her imagination. Everything around her was music and beauty and love--flowers sprang up in the waste places, water gushed from the rock, and melody filled the air. To be forbidden to think of him, to be commanded to wrench him from her heart, to be made to think of herself as a low and disgraced being--Grace would have shuddered at the idea of impiety, but when she laid her head on her pillow, willing to be thought sick, rather than wretched, she certainly wished to die. But the strength of youth, though prostrated, rebounded from the pressure. She was not doomed to the _curse of a granted prayer_. The Providence that had so long watched over her destiny, still kept its unseen but slumbering vigils. Grace remembered her old friends, the Shakers, and yearned once more for their still and passionless existence. She prayed Mr.