friendship and reason would
gain the day.

But the feelings that actuated Evadne were rooted in the depths of her
being, and were such in their growth as he had no means of understanding.
Evadne loved Raymond. He was the hero of her imagination, the image carved
by love in the unchanged texture of her heart. Seven years ago, in her
youthful prime, she had become attached to him; he had served her country
against the Turks; he had in her own land acquired that military glory
peculiarly dear to the Greeks, since they were still obliged inch by inch
to fight for their security. Yet when he returned thence, and first
appeared in public life in England, her love did not purchase his, which
then vacillated between Perdita and a crown. While he was yet undecided,
she had quitted England; the news of his marriage reached her, and her
hopes, poorly nurtured blossoms, withered and fell. The glory of life was
gone for her; the roseate halo of love, which had imbued every object with
its own colour, faded;--she was content to take life as it was, and to
make the best of leaden-coloured reality. She married; and, carrying her
restless energy of character with her into new scenes, she turned her
thoughts to ambition, and aimed at the title and power of Princess of
Wallachia; while her patriotic feelings were soothed by the idea of the
good she might do her country, when her husband should be chief of this
principality. She lived to find ambition, as unreal a delusion as love. Her
intrigues with Russia for the furtherance of her object, excited the
jealousy of the Porte, and the animosity of the Greek government. She was
considered a traitor by both, the ruin of her husband followed; they
avoided death by a timely flight, and she fell from the height of her
desires to penury in England. Much of this tale she concealed from Raymond;
nor did she confess, that repulse and denial, as to a criminal convicted of
the worst of crimes, that of bringing the scythe of foreign despotism to
cut away the new springing liberties of her country, would have followed
her application to any among the Greeks.

She knew that she was the cause of her husband's utter ruin; and she strung
herself to bear the consequences. The reproaches which agony extorted; or
worse, cureless, uncomplaining depression, when his mind was sunk in a
torpor, not the less painful because it was silent and moveless. She
reproached herself with the crime of his death; guilt and i