Man thinks he is strong, and lays his foundations, raises his walls, and dreams of his completed turrets, without reckoning the force of the gales or the insidious inundating of the waters that may bring low the mounting structure before its time. When with a firm hand, Mr. Sylvester thrust back from his heart the one delight which of all the world could afford, seemed to him at that moment the dearest and the best, he thought the struggle was over and the victory won. It had not even commenced. He was made startlingly alive to this fact at the very next interview he had with Paula. She had just come from Miss Stuyvesant, and the reflection of her friend’s scarcely comprehended joy was on her countenance, together with a look he could not comprehend, but which stirred and haunted him, until he felt forced to ask if she had seen any other of her old friends, in the short visit she had paid. “Yes,” said she, with a distressed blush. “Mr. Ensign was unexpectedly there.” It is comparatively easy to restrain your own hand from snatching at a treasure you greatly covet, but it is much more difficult to behold another and a lesser one grasp and carry it away before your eyes. He succeeded in hiding the shadow that oppressed him, but he was constrained to recognize the sharpness of the conflict that was about to be waged in the recesses of his own breast. A conflict, because he knew that a lift of his finger, or a glance of his eye would decide the matter then, while in a week, perhaps, the glamour of a young sunshiny love, would have worked its inevitable result, and the happiness that had so unexpectedly startled upon him in his monotonous and sombre path, would have wandered forever out of his reach. How did he meet its unexpected rush. Sternly at first, but with greater and greater wavering as the days went by, each one revealing fresh beauties of character and deeper springs of feeling in the enchanting girl thus brought in all her varied charm before his eyes. Why should he not be happy? If there were dark pages in his life, had they not long ago been closed and sealed, and was not the future bright with promise? A man of his years was not through with life. He felt at times as he gazed upon her face with its indescribable power of awakening far-reaching thoughts and feelings in callous breasts long unused to the holy influence of either, that he had just begun to live; that the golden country, with its enticing vistas, lay all before him, and that the youth, which he had missed, had somehow returned to his prime, fresh with more than its usual enthusiasm and bright with more than its wonted hopes and projects. With this glorious woman at his side, life would be new indeed, and if new why not pure and sweet and noble? What was there to hinder him from making the existence of this sweet soul a walking amongst gentle duties, satisfied dreams and holy aspirations? A past remorse? Why the gates could be closed on that!