“An angel,” continued the young man, passionately, “a creature as fair and innocent of guile as one of God’s own angels, fluttered between life and death. Oh! who could hope, when the distant world to which she was akin half opened to her view, that she would return to the sorrow and calamity of this! Rose, Rose, to know that you were passing away like some soft shadow, which a light from above casts upon the earth—to have no hope that you would be spared to those who linger here, and to know no reason why you should—to feel that you belonged to that bright sphere whither so many gifted creatures, in infancy and youth, have winged their early flight—and yet to pray, amid all these consolations, that you might be restored to those who loved you—these are distractions almost too great to bear. They were mine by day and night, and with them came such a rushing torrent of fears, and apprehensions, and selfish regrets, lest you should die and never know how devotedly I loved you, as almost bore down sense and reason in its course. You recovered—day by day, and almost hour by hour, some drop of health came back, and mingling with the spent and feeble stream of life which circulated languidly within you, swelled it again to a high and rushing tide. I have watched you change almost from death to life, with eyes that moistened with their own eagerness and deep affection. Do not tell me that you wish I had lost this; for it has softened my heart to all mankind.” “I did not mean that,” said Rose, weeping; “I only wish you had left here, that you might have turned to high and noble pursuits again—to pursuits well worthy of you.” “There is no pursuit more worthy of me—more worthy of the highest nature that exists—than the struggle to win such a heart as yours,” said the young man, taking her hand. “Rose, my own dear Rose, for years—for years, I have loved you, hoping to win my way to fame, and then come proudly home and tell you it had been sought only for you to share; thinking in my day-dreams how I would remind you in that happy moment of the many silent tokens I had given of a boy’s attachment, and rally you who had blushed to mark them, and then claim your hand, as if in redemption of some old mute contract that had been sealed between us. That time has not arrived; but here, with no fame won, and no young vision realized, I give to you the heart so long your own, and stake my all upon the words with which you greet the offer.” “Your behaviour has ever been kind and noble,” said Rose, mastering the emotions by which she was agitated. “As you believe that I am not insensible or ungrateful, so hear my answer.” “It is, that I may endeavour to deserve you—is it, dear Rose?”