st to sue for a reconciliation. Like many other proud
people, however, he was open-hearted and generous, and ready to forgive
when forgiveness was asked; the reason of which might be, that a
petition for pardon is, to the spirit of a proud man, a sort of homage
far more gratifying than the most skilful flattery, since it establishes
at once his own superiority. But to his Emily, Philip was all
consideration and tenderness, and she, poor girl, with the simple faith
of youth and love, believed him to be perfection, and admired even his
pride. A very lovely girl was Emily Sherwood--gifted with a beauty of a
rare and intellectual cast. As she now stood leaning on the arm of her
companion, her tall yet pliant and graceful figure enveloped in the airy
drapery of her white dress, with her eyes turned in mute admiration
towards the dawning day, it would have required but a slight stretch of
the imagination to have beheld in her a priestess of the sun, awaiting
in reverent adoration the appearance of her fire-god. Her complexion and
features, too, would have helped to strengthen the fantasy, for the one
was singularly fair, pale, and transparent, and the other characterized
by delicacy, refinement, and a sort of earnest yet still enthusiasm. Her
hair, of the softest and palest brown, was arranged in simple yet
massive plaits around her finely-shaped head, and crowned with a wreath
of 'starry jessamine.' From the absence of color, one might have
imagined that her beauty would have been cold and statue-like; but you
had only to glance at her soft, intellectual mouth, or to look into her
large, clear, hazel eyes, which seemed to have borrowed their sweet,
thoughtful, chastened radiance from the star whose beams were now fast
paling in the brightening sky, to learn that Emily Sherwood could both
think and love.

"Dear Philip," she said at last, in that low tone which is the natural
expression of all the finer and deeper emotions, "is it not beautiful? I
feel at this moment as if I were almost oppressed with happiness--as if
this were but an intense dream of love and beauty, that must, as
sentimental people say, 'be too bright to last.' I never felt as I do
now in all my life before."

"Nor I neither, my Emily, my sweet little poetess; but I suppose it is
because we love, for love intensifies all the feelings."

"All the best feelings."

"The whole nature, I think. It is, for instance, more difficult to bear
a slight from those w