The elasticity and pressing enterprise of soul inherent in worth renders; no calamity so difficult to be borne as that which betters its best years and most active virtues under the lock of any captivity. Thaddeus felt this benumbing effect in every pulse of his ardent and energetic heart. He retraced all that he had been. He looked on what he was. Though he had reaped glory when a boy, his "noon of manhood," his evening sun, was to waste its light and set in an English prison. At short and distant intervals such melancholy reveries gave place to the pitying image of Mary Beaufort. It sometimes visited him in the day--it always was his companion during the night. He courted her lovely ideal as a spell that for a while stole him from painful reflections. With an entranced soul he recalled every lineament of her angel--like face, every tender sympathy of that gentle voice which had hurried him into the rashness of touching her hand. One moment he pressed her gold chain closer to his heart, almost believing what Lady Tinemouth had insinuated; the next, he would sigh over his credulity, and return with despondent though equally intense love to the contemplation of her virtues, independent of himself. The more he meditated on the purity of her manners, the elevated principles to which he could trace her actions, and, above all, on the benevolent confidence with which she had ever treated him (a man contemned by one part of her acquaintance, and merely received on trust by the remainder), the more he found reasons to regard that character with his grateful admiration. When he drew a comparison between Miss Beaufort and most women of the same quality whom he had seen in England and in other countries, he contemplated with delighted wonder that spotless mind which, having passed through the various ordeals annexed to wealth and fashion, still bore itself uncontaminated. She was beautiful, and she did not regard it; she was accomplished, but she did not attempt a display; what she acquired from education, the graces had so incorporated with her native intelligence, that the perfection of her character seemed to have been stamped at once by the beneficent hand of Providence. Never were her numberless attractions so fascinating to Thaddeus as when he witnessed the generous eagerness with which, forgetful of her own almost unparalleled talents, she pointed out merit and dispensed applause to the deserving. Miss Beaufort's nature was gentle and benevolent; but it was likewise distinguishing and animated. Whilst the count saw that the urbanity of her disposition made her politeness universal, he perceived that neither rank, riches nor splendor, when alone, could extract from her bosom one spark of that lambet flame which streamed from her heart, like fire to the sun, towards the united glory of genius and virtue.