Having caught and properly secured the young lady, the new Baron de Rheinswald takes up his residence for a time “on the borders of Vermont and Canada.” Some years elapse, and so forth. The “Bride of Destiny” is nearly one and twenty; and the Count Laniski makes his appearance with a view of urging his claim. The Heiress, we are forced to say, now behaves in a very unbecoming and unaccountable manner. She should have hung herself as the only rational course, and—heigho!—it would have saved us a world of trouble. But, not having forgotten her old bad habits, she persists in talking about “fate, foreknowledge, and free will,” and it is not therefore to be wondered at that matters in general assume a truly distressing complexion. Just at this crisis, however, a Mr. Frederick Mortimer makes his interesting debût. Never certainly was a more accomplished young man! As becomes a gentleman with such an appellation as Frederick Mortimer, he is more beautiful than Apollo, more sentimental than De Lisle, more distingué than Pelham, and, positively, more mysterious than the “mysterious lady.” He sympathizes with the woes of the “Bride of Destiny,” looks unutterable threats at the Count Laniski, beats even the “Swiss Heiress” at discoursing of “free will,” and the author of the “Swiss Heiress” at quoting paragraphs from a “late writer.” The heart of the “Bride of Destiny” is touched—sensibly touched. But Love, in romance, must have impediments, and the Loves of the “Bride of Destiny” and Mr. Frederick Mortimer have two. The first is some inexpressible mystery connected with a certain gold ring, of which the Heiress is especially careful, and the second is that rascally old Baron {716} Rheinswald's “eternal curse.” Nothing farther therefore can be done in the premises, but as we have now only reached Chapter the Sixth, and there are to be seventeen chapters in all, it is necessary to do something—and what better can be done than to talk, until Chapter the Fifteenth, about “fate, foreknowledge, and free will?” Only imagine a string of delightful sentences, such as the following, for the short space of three hundred and ninety-six pages! “How rapidly time flies,” said the Count, “I have been here weeks, and they seem but days.” “I am not surprised, my lord,” said Mrs. Falkner, smiling. “Nor I,” he returned, also smiling. “This place, such society, wraps the senses in such blissful illusion that I ‘take no note of time.’ The clock strikes unheeded, unheard.” “Why do you smile, Miss Montargis?” asked Mrs. Falkner. “I was just thinking,” she replied, “that Count Laniski had unconsciously given a ‘local habitation and a name’ to the fabled region where cold is so intense as to congeal sound.” Mrs. Falkner bowed, but could not comprehend what such a region had to do with Count Laniski's compliment to the heiress.