But I see you are curious to know whether the young Eva was proof against the attractions of the gallant officer? Did her guileless heart receive no arrow from the vagrant Cupid, who is so apt to make one in water excursions and rambles in search of the picturesque; and who, often an unbidden guest, forces himself into pleasant country parties, to disturb their harmony and mar all their pastimes. She remained “fancy free;” for Julian Fitzgerald deigned not to borrow from the quiver of the mischievous boy, and Eva’s was not a love to be bestowed, unsought. She was a being, too, of deep affections: and though her cousin was handsome, brave, full of recitals of wild and varied interest, and amusing sketches of life and manners, which she knew only through books, his character was not one to excite her enthusiasm. It seemed to her romantic spirit, deficient in the lofty qualities which could alone call forth the enduring love of a refined, feeling woman; though she admitted that it must be a very pleasant world where the men were all as gay, and agreeable, and courteous as he. With his knowledge of the human heart, he might have found it no very difficult matter to deceive his cousin Eva’s penetration, had his pride or vanity, or any of the thousand springs of action by which men are actuated, been put in motion: but he existed for more stirring scenes; though, now like a bird pursuing its mysterious way from one far land to another, he paused to rest for awhile amid song and sunshine. The hours of Fitzgerald’s absence were spent by the family in preparing mementos of regard, for him to take to their mutual friends in England. He returned before Eva had completed her package; and, as if to drive away care, rallied her on the Quaker taste of her presents. But though he assumed gaiety, he was restless and uneasy, and sometimes fell into fits of abstraction, from which he would suddenly start, and attribute his unusual sadness to the prospect of parting so soon from his only friends in America. Eldred hung on him, persuading him with artless and disinterested affection to renounce his wandering life, and share with him the large domains that would be his in a few years. But the young officer smiling at the boy’s simplicity, replied that he would “owe fortune only to his own arm, and to the favoring gale.”