Mary, who investigated the cause of these tremors on her pillow, bedewed it with delicious though bitter tears, when her alarmed soul whispered that she nourished for this amiable foreigner "a something than friendship dearer." "Ah! is it come to this?" cried she, pressing down her saturated eyelids with her hand. "Am I at last to love a man who, perhaps, never casts a thought on me? How despicable shall I become in my own eyes!" The pride of woman puts this charge to her taken heart--that heart which seems tempered of the purest clay, and warmed with the fire of heaven; that tender and disinterested heart asks as its appeal--What is love? Is it not an admiration of all that is beautiful in nature and in the soul? Is it not a union of loveliness with truth? Is it not a passion whose sole object is the rapture of contemplating the supreme beauty of this combined character? "Where, then," cried the enthusiastic Mary, "where is the shame that can be annexed to my loving Constantine? If it be honorable to love delineated excellence, it must be equally so to love it when embodied in a human shape. Such it is in Constantine; and if love be the reflected light of virtue, I may cease to arraign myself of that which otherwise I would have scorned. Therefore, Constantine," cried she, raising her clasped hands, whilst renewed tears streamed over her face, "I will love thee! I will pray for thy happiness, though its partner should be Euphemia Dundas." Mary's eager imagination would not allow her to perceive those obstacles in the shapes of pride and prudence, which would stand in the way of his obtaining Euphemia's hand; its light showed to her only a rival in the person of the little beauty; but from her direct confidence she continued to retreat with abhorrence. Had Euphemia been more deserving of Constantine, Miss Beaufort believed she would have been less reluctant to hear that she loved him. But Mary could not avoid seeing that Miss E. Dundas possessed little to ensure connubial comfort, if mere beauty and accidental flights of good humor were not to be admitted into the scale. She was weak in understanding, timid in principle, absurd in almost every opinion she adopted; and as for love, true, dignified, respectable love, she knew nothing of the sentiment. Whilst Miss Beaufort meditated on this meagre schedule of her rival's merits, the probability that even such a man as Constantine might sacrifice himself to flattery and to splendor stung her to the soul.