unlooked-for incident in the regularity of human afflictions. He was
insensible of his daughter's danger, for he was not one whom the fear
of love endows with prophetic vision; and he lived tranquilly in the
present, without asking what new misfortune awaited him in the future.
Yet he loved his child, his only child, with whatever of affection
was left him by the many shocks his heart had received; and in her
approaching connection with one rich and noble as Trevylyan, he
felt even something bordering upon pleasure. Lapped in the apathetic
indifference of his nature, he leaned back in the carriage, enjoying the
bright weather that attended their journey, and sensible--for he was one
of fine and cultivated taste--of whatever beauties of nature or remains
of art varied their course. A companion of this sort was the most
agreeable that two persons never needing a third could desire; he left
them undisturbed to the intoxication of their mutual presence; he marked
not the interchange of glances; he listened not to the whisper, the low
delicious whisper, with which the heart speaks its sympathy to heart. He
broke not that charmed silence which falls over us when the thoughts are
full, and words leave nothing to explain; that repose of feeling; that
certainty that we are understood without the effort of words, which
makes the real luxury of intercourse and the true enchantment of travel.
What a memory hours like these bequeath, after we have settled down into
the calm occupation of common life! How beautiful, through the vista of
years, seems that brief moonlight track upon the waters of our youth!

And Trevylyan's nature, which, as I have said before, was naturally
hard and stern, which was hot, irritable, ambitious, and prematurely
tinctured with the policy and lessons of the world, seemed utterly
changed by the peculiarities of his love. Every hour, every moment was
full of incident to him; every look of Gertrude's was entered in the
tablets of his heart; so that his love knew no languor, it required no
change: he was absorbed in it,--_it was himself_! And he was soft, and
watchful as the step of a mother by the couch of her sick child;
the lion within him was tamed by indomitable love; the sadness, the
presentiment, that was mixed with all his passion for Gertrude, filled
him too with that poetry of feeling which is the result of thoughts
weighing upon us, and not to be expressed by ordinary language. In this
part of their