As we have before observed, however, all the fervor of their affection had been centered in their mother, and that was indeed a melancholy night in which the youths had been summoned to watch the passing away of her gentle spirit for ever from their love. Isabella De Haldimar had, from her earliest infancy, been remarkable for her quiet and contemplative character; and bred amid scenes that brought at every retrospect recollections of some acted horror, it is not surprising that the bias given by nature should have been developed and strengthened by the events that had surrounded her. Not dissimilar in disposition, as she was not unlike in form, to her mother, she was by that mother carefully endowed with those gentler attributes of goodness, which, taking root within a soil so eminently disposed to their reception, could not fail to render her in after life a model of excellence, both as a mother and a wife. Notwithstanding, however, this moulding of her pliant and well-directed mind, there was about her a melancholy, which, while it gave promise of the devoted affection of the mother, offered but little prospect of cheerfulness, in an union with one, who, reserved himself, could not be expected to temper that melancholy by the introduction of a gaiety that was not natural to him. And yet it was for this very melancholy, tender and fascinating in her, that Major Grantham had sought the hand of Isabella De Haldimar; and it was for the very austerity and reserve of his general manner, more than from the manly beauty of his tall dark person, that he too had become the object of her secret choice long before he had proposed for her.