eyes with one hand, as if to hide the anguished expression of her companion’s face, and continued—
“To you, Julien, I owe a confession which I thought should have died with me. When I was young—scarcely sixteen, my mother died. My father could not endure the mournful loneliness of our village home after she had gone, and in the bustle and excitement of business in the city he strove to forget all sad memories. It was then that I parted from Howard Beauchamp, the only child of our village minister. His mother had died in his infancy, and we had been almost constantly together from our childhood. Upon the evening of our parting we exchanged promises of eternal constancy.
“Months passed—his letters brought me the only happiness that I knew, for my father could in no way replace to me the love which in my mother’s death I lost. At length the letters ceased entirely. I heard of his father’s death, and of his own illness, and still I wrote, for I could not believe that he was false to me. One day a note was brought to me—the handwriting was strange. I broke the seal. It was from a cousin of his whom I had never seen, but of whom he had often spoken to me as a prodigy of beauty and talent. She wrote me that she had nursed him during his illness—that change of air had been prescribed by the physician, and that he had accompanied her to her Southern home, where it was now his intention to reside. In delicate and sympathizing words she wrote of the transferral of Howard’s love from me, to her, his cousin—of their strong attachment for each other, and her earnest wish that I would not tell him that she had written. ‘Not for my sake do I write this,’ she said, ‘but for his, whose happiness is dearer to me than life itself.’ There was but one course before me. I summoned all my pride, and wrote to him what I imagined I ought to feel, not what I did. I made no allusion to his cousin. I told him that I loved him no longer; I wrote a great deal that was false, but I fully intended to make it truth. Years passed—we travelled all over the United States, and I heard no more from Howard Beauchamp. When at Newport you saved my life, and added to it the offering of your own, I felt toward you more affection than had been awakened for years; but I was deceived with regard to my
