time, but
since then a rich planter, on his return to his native land, has built
himself a country house, and planted a garden in these, his paternal
acres. Our mules were turned loose, and left to graze in the wood under
the care of the children who acted as our guides. We walked on alone
from tree to tree, from one glade to another on the narrow neck of
land, until we reached the extreme point, where we saw the shining
lake, and heard its splashing waters. This wood of Saint Innocent is a
promontory that stretches out into the lake at the wildest and most
lonely part of its shores; it ends in some rocks of gray granite, which
are sometimes washed by the foam of the wind-tossed waves, but are dry
and shining when the waters subside into repose. We sat down on two
stones close to each other. Before us, the dark pile of the Abbey of
Haute-Combe rose on the opposite shore of the lake. Our eyes were fixed
on a little white speck that seemed to shine at the foot of the gloomy
terraces of the monastery. It was the fisherman's house, where we had
been thrown together by the waves, and united forever by that chance
meeting; it was the room where we had spent that heavenly and yet
funereal night which had decided the fate of both our lives. "It was
there!" she said, stretching out her arm, and pointing to the bright
speck, which was scarcely visible in the distance and darkness of the
opposite shore. "Will there come a day and a place," she added
mournfully, "in which the memory of all we felt there during those
deathless hours will appear to you, in the remoteness of the past, but
as that little speck on the dark background of yonder shore?"

I could not reply to these words; her tone, her doubts, the prospect of
death, inconstancy, and frailty, and the possibility of forgetfulness,
had struck me to the heart, and filled me with sad forebodings. I burst
into tears. I hid my face in my hands, and turned towards the evening
breeze, that it might dry my tears in my eyes; but she had seen them.

"Raphael," she resumed with greater tenderness, "no, you will never
forget me. I know it, I feel it; but love is short, and life is slow.
You will live many years beyond me. You will drain all that is sweet,
or powerful, or bitter in the cup that Nature offers to the lips of
man. You will be a man! I know it by your sensibility, which is at once
manly and feminine. You will be a man to the full extent of all the
wretchedness and dignity o