It was spring-time in the South—that rich, bright season more luxurious in foliage and profuse in fragrance than our warm and mellow summers ever are. The orange-trees were all in flower; carnations blushed warm and glowing upon the garden banks; the grass was mottled with tiny blossoms, gorgeous and sweet as the air they breathed. All around the house which Zulima occupied was hedged in with honeysuckles and prairie-roses, that sheltered the grounds and leaped up here and there among the magnolia-trees, lacing them together in festoons and arcades of fantastic beauty. Poor, poor Zulima! With this beautiful paradise to wander in, with the sweet air, the warm sky, and all that world of flowers, how unhappy she was! Alone—utterly alone!—her child slept in the bosom of another; her husband had been months away in the far North; an unacknowledged wife, a bereaved parent, how could she choose but weep? Weeks had gone by and no letter reached her; at first her husband had written every day; and with his letters, eloquent of love, lying against her heart, she could not be wholly miserable; thinking of him she sometimes forgot to mourn for her child. At first she had been greatly distressed by the impediments which the flight of De Grainges had multiplied against the acknowledgment of her marriage, but this event had in no degree shaken the holy trust which that young heart placed in the object of its love. Singularly unambitious in her desires, but impetuous in feeling, she only felt the continued secrecy maintained regarding her marriage, because it separated her from the babe she had learned to love so intensely. True, it served as a restraint upon her husband, and frequently deprived her of his presence, but with her imaginative nature, the slight romance of this privacy only served to keep her affections more vivid and her fancy more restless. She was all impulse, all feeling, and sometimes, like a caged bird, she grew wild and restive under the restraints that necessity had placed upon her. Weeks went by, one after another, and now Zulima grew wild with vague fears. Why was he silent? where could he be wandering thus to forget her so completely? Her nights were sleepless; her eyes grew bright and wild with feverish anxiety. That young heart was in every way prepared for the poison which was to be poured into it drop by drop, till jealousy, that most fierce and bitter of all the passions, should break forth in its might and change her whole being. Zulima had gone forth alone, not into the garden to sigh among its wilderness of blossoms, but away, with an aching heart and pale forehead, to suffer among the wild nooks of the neighboring hollows. Here nature started to life in harsher beauty, and sent forth her sweets with a sort of rude waywardness, forming a contrast to the voluptuous air and over cultivation that closed in her home, as it were, from the rough and true things of the world.