"It was by the bedside of his dying sister, that I first met Walter Elmore. Effie had been a schoolmate of mine, and an intimate friendship had sprung up between us. Sisterless as I was, I had learned to cherish for her almost a sister's love. Soon after we left school, her father removed his residence from a distant part of the country to the city near which mine resided, and our girlish attachment was cemented and strengthened, as we entered, hand in hand, upon the duties and pleasures of early womanhood. "Effie's constitution was naturally weak, and she had been subject from her childhood to a slight cough; but her friends gave little heed to it, as the buoyancy of her spirits and her unchanged demeanour seemed to preclude the idea of any seated complaint. But the destroyer came, and disease had made fearful havoc before we awoke to a sense of her danger. I was with her day and night for a few weeks, and then Effie Elmore, in her youth and loveliness, slept the 'sleep that knows no waking.' "Her brother, of whom I had often heard her speak in terms of enthusiastic fondness, had been abroad, completing his studies, and I never met him until we stood, side by side, gazing upon the calm, still face of the beautiful being whom we both so tenderly loved. "It is needless for me to say that from that hour we met often. At my father's house he became a frequent and a welcome guest; and we met too, at no distant intervals, by Effie's grave, in her favourite walks, and in every nook that had been made sacred by her presence. We thought that it was our mutual love for the departed that drew us together; we thought it was her memory, and the recollection of the hour when first we met, that made us seek each other's society, and that rendered the moments we spent together so dear to us both; but ah me! but few months had rolled over our heads before we found that it was even a stronger tie; that it was the mystic chain that binds heart to heart, the deep love of congenial spirits.