Isabel raised her eyes to his, and a smile, sweet, comforting, and full of love, passed the lips which were about to close forever. “Thank Heaven,” she murmured, “for your dear sake. It is pleasant to die now, and thus;” and she placed the hand that was clasped in her relaxing and wan fingers within the bosom which had been for anguished and hopeless years his asylum and refuge, and which now when fortune changed, as if it had only breathed in comfort to his afflictions, was for the first time and forever to be cold,--cold even to him! “You will live, you will live,” cried Mordaunt, in wild and incredulous despair, “in mercy live! You, who have been my angel of hope, do not,--O God, O God! do not desert me now!” But that faithful and loving heart was already deaf to his voice, and the film grew darkening and rapidly over the eye which still with undying fondness sought him out through the shade and agony of death. Sense and consciousness were gone, and dim and confused images whirled round her soul, struggling a little moment before they sank into the depth and silence where the past lies buried. But still mindful of him, and grasping, as it were, at his remembrance, she clasped, closer and closer, the icy hand which she held, to her breast. “Your hand is cold, dearest, it is cold,” said she, faintly, “but I will warm it here!” And so her spirit passed away, and Mordaunt felt afterwards, in a lone and surviving pilgrimage, that her last thought had been kindness to him, and that her last act had spoken forgetfulness even of death in the tenderness of love! CHAPTER LIX Change and time take together their flight.--Golden Violet. One evening in autumn, about three years after the date of our last chapter, a stranger on horseback, in deep mourning, dismounted at the door of the Golden Fleece, in the memorable town of W----. He walked into the taproom, and asked for a private apartment and accommodation for the night. The landlady, grown considerably plumper than when we first made her acquaintance, just lifted up her eyes to the stranger’s face, and summoning a short stout man (formerly the waiter, now the second helpmate of the comely hostess), desired him, in a tone which partook somewhat more of the authority indicative of their former relative situations than of the obedience which should have characterized their present, “to show the gentleman to the Griffin, No. 4.” The stranger smiled as the sound greeted his ears, and he followed not so much the host as the hostess’s spouse into the apartment thus designated. A young lady, who some eight years ago little thought that she should still be in a state of single blessedness, and who always honoured with an attentive eye the stray travellers who, from their youth, loneliness, or that ineffable air which usually designates the unmarried man, might be in the same solitary state of life, turned to the landlady and said,-- “Mother, did you observe what a handsome gentleman that was?”