A bright happy smile lighted up her face as Arthur, kissing her forehead lightly, said a few farewell words. Nor did the look of placid contentment fade away even after the music of his foot upon the stair had ceased to echo in her ears; for the young wife was wonderfully happy--as happy, perhaps, as it is ever given to mortal woman here below to feel. Assured of her husband’s affection, and adoring him with all the force of her warm young heart; with not a wish ungratified, and endowed with health and spirits to enjoy the good gifts that were with such a lavish hand bestowed upon her; blest with a kind father’s doting tenderness, and dreaming as she lay on her luxuriant couch of the “prime of bliss” in a few weeks to be accorded to her prayers, who can wonder that Arthur Vavasour’s wife was one of the happiest of her sex? And he, the man who was so seldom absent from her thoughts, the husband, to obey whose slightest wish was felt by the unselfish Sophy to be a blessed privilege which all must envy her, did he, as he strode forth hastily, for he had an appointment and was late, feel no remorseful pang for wandering thoughts, and dreams on joys forbidden? I fear that to this query I must answer in the negative. It is not in the earliest stages of our cherished sins that the avenging demon of unavailing regret rises up before us, and embitters joys that else were sweet. Sin, the very wickedness that is destined to be our ruin and shame, assumes at the beginning such very fair and false proportions. In early sunlight the shadows are so short, the path before so bright, the glare so dazzling and the day so long. It is when the shadows lengthen, and the night approaches, when the sin which in the distance looked so unlike crime stands revealed a hideous skeleton, bereft of all its false adornments, in our walk by day and in our couch by night, that we look back to the past with misery and vain remorse, asking ourselves the bitter, futile question whether the gain is worthy of the cost, while like withered leaves in the sad autumn time, “The hopes of our youth fall thick in the blast, And the days are dark and dreary.”