self, and
perhaps against her will, into my grave, struck me with horror. I fell
back into the boat with my burden; I loosed the ropes that bound us,
and laid her on the seat; I dipped my hands into the lake and sprinkled
the cold drops of water on her lips and forehead. I know not how long
she remained thus without color, voice, or motion. When she first
opened her eyes and regained consciousness, night was coming on, and
the slow drift of the boat had carried us into the middle of the lake.

"God wills it not," I said. "We live; what we thought the privilege of
our love was a double crime. Is there no one to whom we belong on
earth? No one in heaven?" I added looking upwards reverentially, as
though I had seen in the firmament the sovereign Judge and Lord of our
destinies. "Speak no more of it," she said in a low and hurried tone;
"never speak of it again! You have chosen that I should live; I will
live; my crime was not in dying, but in taking you with me!" There was
something of bitterness and tender reproach in her tone and in her
look. "It may be," said I, replying to her thoughts,--"it may be that
heaven itself has no such hours as those we have just passed; but life
has,--that is enough to make me love it." She soon recovered her bloom
and her serenity. I seized the oars, and slowly rowed back to the
little sandy beach, where we heard the voices of the boatmen, who had
lighted a fire beneath a projecting rock. We recrossed the lake, and
returned home silently and thoughtfully.

XXXVI.

In the evening, when I went into her room, I found her seated in tears
before her little table, where several open letters were lying
scattered among the tea things. "We had better have died at once, for
here is the lingering death of separation, which begins for me," she
said, pointing to some letters which bore the postmark of Paris and
Geneva.

Her husband wrote that he began to be very anxious at her long absence
at a season of the year when the weather might become inclement from
day to day; that he felt himself gradually declining and that he wished
to embrace and bless her before he died. His mournful entreaties were
intermingled with many expressions of paternal fondness, and some
sportive allusions to the fair young brother, who made her forget her
other friends. The other letter was from the Genevese doctor, who was
to have come to take her back to Paris. He wrote to say that he was
obliged unexpectedly to l