She blushed a little and turned away, and thus the conversation ended. CHAPTER X. THE RECALL. Albert of Morseiul rode on his way with a heart ill at case. The excitement of the preceding night was gone, and the lassitude that succeeded it was like the weakness after a fever. It seemed to him that the last cheerful hours of life were over, and the rest was all to be strife and anguish; that the last of all the sweet dreams, with which hope and youth deck the future, were done and passed away, and nothing but the stern grey reality was left. It is hard and sorrowful to make up the mind to any parting, and tenfold hard and sorrowful to make up the mind to our parting with the sweet promising fancies of our early days, to put ourselves under a harsher guide for ever, and follow with him a rugged and a cheerless path, when before we had been treading on sweet sunshiny flowers. In general, it is true, the wise beneficence of Heaven has provided that we should not part with all at once, but that the visions and the dreams, like the many gay companions of our boyhood, should either be abandoned for others, or drop away from our side, one by one, till all are gone, and we hardly mark which is the last. But there are times when all are snatched away together, or, as in the case of Albert of Morseiul, when the last that is taken is the brightest and the best, and the parting is clear, defined, and terrible. Bitter, bitter, then, were his feelings as he rode away from Poitiers, and made up his mind that the last dream of youth was over, that the nourished vision of long years was dissipated, that the bubble was burst, and that all was gone; that she who, half ideal, half real, had been that object round which both memory and imagination had clung as the something splendid for the future, was not what he had dreamt of, and even if she were, could never, never be his; and that at length that theme of thought was gone from him for ever. That moment and that spot seemed to form the parting place, where youth, imagination, and happiness were left behind, and care, reality, and anxiety started forward with latter life.