confessed, the good man derived very
little comfort.

Miss Eliza, though she is not made a confidant in these latter secrets
of the study, cannot, however, fail to see that Reuben's constancy to
the Doctor's big folios is on the wane, and that symptoms of his old
boyish recklessness occasionally show themselves under the reserve which
had grown out of his later experiences. She has hopes from this--true to
her keen worldly wisdom--that the abandoned career of the city may yet
win his final decision. But her moral perceptions are not delicate
enough to discover the great and tormenting wrangle of his thought. She
ventures from time to time, as on his return, and from sharp sense of
duty, some wiry, stereotyped religious reflections, which set his whole
moral nature on edge. Nor is this the limit of her blindness:
perceiving, as she imagines she does, the ripening of all her plans with
respect to himself and Adele, she thinks to further the matter by
dropping hints of the rare graces of Adele and of her brilliant
prospects,--assuring him how much that young lady's regard for him has
been increased since his conversion, (which word has to Reuben just now
a dreary and most detestable sound,) and in a way which she counts
playful, but which to him is _agacant_ to the last degree, she forecasts
the time when Reuben will have his pretty French wife, and a rich one.

Left to himself, the youth would very likely have found enough to admire
in the face and figure and pleasantly subdued enthusiasm of Adele; but
the counter irritant of the spinster's speech drove him away on many an
evening to the charming fireside of the Elderkins, where he spent not a
few beguiling hours in listening to the talk of the motherly mistress of
the household, and in watching the soft hazel eyes of Rose, as they
lifted in eager wonderment at some of his stories of the town, or fell
(the long lashes hiding them with other beauty) upon the work where her
delicate fingers plied with a white swiftness that teased him into
trains of thought which were not wholly French.

Adele has taken a melancholy interest in decking the grave of the exiled
lady, which she has insisted upon doing out of her own resources, and
thus has doubled the little legacy which Madame Aries had left to the
outcast woman and child with whom she had joined her fate, and who, with
good reason, wept her death bitterly. Hour upon hour Adele pondered over
that tragic episode, tasking he