The young man staid till the surgeon arrived, till the arm was set; nor did he depart until he had obtained a promise from the mother, that he should learn the next morning how the sufferer had passed the night. The next morning, indeed, he had intended to quit a town that offers but little temptation to the traveller; but he tarried day after day, until Lucille herself accompanied her mother to assure him of her recovery. You know, or at least I do, dearest Gertrude, that there _is_ such a thing as love at the first meeting--a secret and unaccountable affinity between persons (strangers before,) which draws them irresistibly together. If there were truth in Plato's beautiful phantasy, that our souls were a portion of the stars, it might be, that spirits thus attracted to each other, have drawn their original light from the same orb; and they thus but yearn for a renewal of their former union. Yet, without recurring to such ideal solutions of a daily mystery, it was but natural that one in the forlorn and desolate condition of Eugene St. Amand, should have felt a certain tenderness for a person who had so generously suffered for his sake. The darkness to which he was condemned did not shut from his mind's eye the haunting images of ideal beauty; rather, on the contrary, in his perpetual and unoccupied solitude, he fed the reveries of an imagination naturally warm, and a heart eager for sympathy. He had said rightly that his only test of beauty was in the melody of voice; and never had a softer or a more thrilling tone than that of the young maiden touched upon his ear. Her exclamation, so beautifully denying self, so devoted in its charity, "Thank God, _you_ are saved!" uttered too, in the moment of her own suffering, rang constantly upon his soul, and he yielded, without precisely defining their nature, to vague and delicious sentiments, that his youth had never awakened to till then. And Lucille--the very accident that had happened to her on his behalf, only deepened the interest she had already conceived for one who, in the first flush of youth, was thus cut off from the glad objects of life, and led to a night of years, desolate and alone. There is, to your beautiful and kindly sex, a perpetual and gushing _lovingness to protect_. This makes them the angels of sickness, the comforters of age, the fosterers of childhood; and this feeling, in Lucille peculiarly developed, had already inexpressibly linked her compassionate nature to the lot of the unfortunate traveller. With ardent affections, and with thoughts beyond her station and her years, she was not without that modest vanity which made her painfully susceptible to her own deficiencies in beauty. Instinctively conscious of how deeply she herself could love, she believed it impossible that she could ever be so loved in return. This stranger, so superior in her eyes to all she had yet seen, was the first out of her own household