Now, however, what were his feelings?--now that his situation was changed in every particular,--that in fortune, and in station, he had fallen at once from the situation in which she had promised him her hand; and when he felt that he had no right to claim from Marian de Vaux the execution of a promise which she had made under different circumstances, and to which he believed that all her friends would, of course, be opposed, as soon as his real position became known? He felt that he had no right either to ask or to expect it; and the darkest image that presented itself to his mind was, the loss of her he loved, for ever. Nor did this image come before him vague and undefined, as a thing of remote possibility,--though even then the apprehension would have been terrible enough,--but, in his present state of despondency, it appeared as an undoubted and inevitable certainty--as a thing that must and would take place. He felt as if Marian were _already_ lost to him for ever, and the bright bubble of his happiness irreparably broken. He fancied, also,--he could not help imagining, that something like contempt would mingle in the pity that she felt for him. She was herself so pure,--delicacy, modesty, and virtue so characterized her every movement, and her every word,--that he tortured himself with believing that a part of the reprobation and scorn with which she must think of his mother, would fall upon himself. "She will look upon me as the child of vice," he thought; "she will see in me the offspring of guilt and shame, and will easily make up her mind to the separation. She is always so reasonable, and so willing to do what she considers right, at any sacrifice, that her mind will soon be tutored to forget Edward de Vaux. Were she of that warm, ardent, deep-feeling nature that casts fate and happiness upon one die, I might hope that she would still cling to me: but it is in vain thinking of it--I have no reason to hope it. She will follow the dictates of common sense and prudence, and abandon an alliance which all her friends would now oppose." Poor Marian! thus did her unhappy lover contrive to wring his own heart even with her very virtues. After thinking for at least an hour in gloomy silence, a faint hope crossed his mind, that he might have mistaken the import of the letter--that his apprehensions might have deceived him. Experience, gained from the consequences of our faults, almost always, sooner or later, gives us a vague, unsatisfactory consciousness that such things exist in our bosom; and Edward de Vaux did know that he was given to torment himself needlessly. He therefore read the letter over again, and read it carefully; but, on doing so, his first impression was but the more confirmed.