r a while in his arms. "If I can love you still!"
he cried at last. "Holy mother of God! Do you think that all my best
heart's blood has gone from me, through that little wound? Don't you
hear it hammering now, as though it would burst my breast, and go to
you? But if you say this to try me, or because you pity me, I can
forget it--you are not to think you owe me this, because you know what
I have suffered for you."

"No!" she said very resolutely, looking up from his shoulder, into his
face, with her tearful eyes; "it is because I love you;--and let me
tell you, it was because I always feared to love you, that I was so
cross. I will be so different now--I never could bear again to pass you
in the street, without one look! And lest you should ever feel a doubt,
I will kiss you, that you may say, 'she kissed me:' and Laurella kisses
no man but her husband."

She kissed him thrice, and escaping from his arms: "And now good night,
amor mio, cara vita mia!" she said. "Lie down to sleep, and let your
hand get well. Do not come with me; I am afraid of no man, save of you
alone."

And so she slipped out, and soon disappeared in the shadow of the wall.

He remained standing by the window; gazing far out over the calm sea,
while all the stars in Heaven appeared to flit before his eyes.

The next time the little curato sat in his confessional, he sat smiling
to himself: Laurella had just risen from her knees after a very long
confession.

"Who would have thought it?" he said musingly; "that the Lord would so
soon have taken pity upon that wayward little heart? And I had been
reproaching myself, for not having adjured more sternly that ill demon
of perversity. Our eyes are but shortsighted to see the ways of
Heaven!"

"Well, may God bless her I say! and let me live to go to sea with
Laurella's eldest born, rowing me in his father's place! Ah! well,
indeed! L'Arrabiata!"

COUNT ERNEST'S HOME.

COUNT ERNEST'S HOME.

While I was at College, I chanced, one summer, to fall into habits of
frequent and intimate intercourse with a young man, whose intellectual
countenance and refinement of character never failed to exercise a
winning influence, even upon the most cursory of his acquaintance.

I may call our connection intimate; for I was the only one of our
student set, whom he ever asked to go and see him, or himself
occasionally visited. But in our relatio