Early the succeeding morning, I decided on going to the wood. Should it be free--what a pleasure! Should the stranger be there--I had only to repeat, in a fuller manner, the sense of my last night's words and quit him. Oh, Caroline, had you ever loved!--but love itself without separation could not have taught you the omnipotent value a lover's heart affixes to time, place, and memory! Who, in revisiting the hallowed ground of affection, can describe that slow eagerness of step, that still tumult of delight, which restrains while it impels, purchasing delay?--If these are not the happiest moments of life, at least, they are most worthy living for. The soul expands into a new existence. The body's encumbering mass seems no longer her organ. Even now, Caroline, the charm returns, infusing itself through every vein, sending life's best blood in thrills to the heart, enkindling pleasure into agony! I cannot proceed.--Will not Clement write me one line?--Another letter shall inform you, in what manner I discovered him; for the personated hermit is your Mr. Murden. SIBELLA LETTER IV FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME I know not precisely where to begin, nor how much of the adventure I told you in my last. Did I not say, that, while yet at my oak, Nina entered the wood a little below the tomb and without observing me began to climb the rock? But I think I broke off before I had mentioned her swift return at my call, and the irresolution she betrayed by running backward and forward from me to the rock, and from the rock back again to me. Desirous to know what her manner portended, I arose as if to follow, and away she bounded, taking the path up to the hermitage. As she ascended much swifter than I could, she waited on the outer side of the ruin till I also arrived; and then bent her course round to the farther part, which being the most perfect of the building I imagined she had chosen for the purpose of sheltering her young ones. It is called the chapel. Standing on a projecting point of the rock, it is difficult of access, for the path is cumbered with loose stones, from one to the other of which runs in perplexing branches the twining ivy. High grass and clusters of bramble choak the wild flowers that shed their inviting fragrance on part of the lower side of the rock, nor do I remember ever but twice before to have gone beyond the unroofed cell, where Clement and I, one happy spring morning, raised a seat of stone, and plucked away the weeds that new springing grass might mingle with our mossy foot-stool. There too we planted a woodbine, rose, and jassamine, but the cell refused nourishment to our favorites. Foiled in our attempt to make the ruin bloom a garden, it had no longer for us any attractions.