moiselle_!" A tall figure, with a shade over his eyes, and
wrapped in a long military cloak, stood in the room. A thrill shot
across Lucille's heart. He stretched out his arms. "Lucille," said that
melancholy voice, which had made the music of her first youth, "where
art thou, Lucille? Alas! she does not recognize St. Amand."

Thus was it indeed. By a singular fatality, the burning suns and the
sharp dust of the plains of Egypt had smitten the young soldier, in
the flush of his career, with a second--and this time with an
irremediable--blindness! He had returned to France to find his hearth
lonely. Julie was no more,--a sudden fever had cut her off in the midst
of youth; and he had sought his way to Lucille's house, to see if one
hope yet remained to him in the world!

And when, days afterwards, humbly and sadly he re-urged a former suit,
did Lucille shut her heart to its prayer? Did her pride remember its
wound; did she revert to his desertion; did she reply to the whisper of
her yearning love, "_Thou hast been before forsaken_"? That voice and
those darkened eyes pleaded to her with a pathos not to be resisted. "I
am once more necessary to him," was all her thought; "if I reject him
who will tend him?" In that thought was the motive of her conduct; in
that thought gushed back upon her soul all the springs of checked but
unconquered, unconquerable love! In that thought, she stood beside him
at the altar, and pledged, with a yet holier devotion than she might
have felt of yore, the vow of her imperishable truth.

And Lucille found, in the future, a reward, which the common world could
never comprehend. With his blindness returned all the feelings she had
first awakened in St. Amand's solitary heart; again he yearned for her
step, again he missed even a moment's absence from his side, again her
voice chased the shadow from his brow, and in her presence was a sense
of shelter and of sunshine. He no longer sighed for the blessing he had
lost; he reconciled himself to fate, and entered into that serenity of
mood which mostly characterizes the blind.

Perhaps after we have seen the actual world, and experienced its hollow
pleasures, we can resign ourselves the better to its exclusion; and
as the cloister, which repels the ardour of our hope, is sweet to
our remembrance, so the darkness loses its terror when experience has
wearied us with the glare and travail of the day. It was something, too,
as they advanced in life, to