."

This was, perhaps, pressing her strength too far; at all events, the
injunction came so unexpectedly, that a pause followed it, and they
waited with painful expectation to see what she would do. For upwards
of a minute she sat silent, and her lips moved as if she were communing
with herself. At length she rose up, and stooping down kissed her
lover's cheek, then, taking his hand as before between hers, she said in
a voice astonishingly calm.

"Charles, farewell--remember that I am your Jane Sinclair. Alas!" she
added, "I am weak and feeble--help me out of the room." Both her parents
assisted her to leave it, but, on reaching the door, she drew back
involuntarily, on hearing Osborne's struggles to detain her.

"Papa," she said, with a look inexpressibly wobegone and
suppliant--"Mamma!" "Sweet child, what is it?" said both. "Let me take
one last look of him--it will be the last--but not--I--I trust, the last
act of my duty to you both."

She turned round and gazed upon him for some time--her features, as she
looked, dilated into an expression of delight.

"Is he not," said she, in a low placid whisper, while her smiling
eye still rested upon him--"is he not beautiful? Oh! yes, he is
beautiful--he is beautiful."

"He is, darling--he is," said both--"come away now--be only a good firm
girl and all will soon be well."

"Very, very beautiful," said she, in a low contented voice, as without
any further wish to remain, she accompanied her parents to another room.

Such was their leaving-taking--thus did they separate. Did they ever
meet!

PART III.

In the history of the affections we know that circumstances sometimes
occur, where duty and inclination maintain a conflict so nicely balanced
so as to render it judicious not to exact a fulfillment of the former,
lest by deranging the structure of our moral feelings, we render the
mind either insensible to their existence, or incapable of regulating
them. This observation applies only to those subordinate positions
of life which involve no great principle of conduct, and violate no
cardinal point of human duty. We ought neither to do evil nor suffer
evil to be done, where our authority can prevent it, in order that good
may follow. But in matters where our own will creates the offence, it is
in some peculiar cases not only prudent but necessary to avoid straining
a mind naturally delicate, beyond the powers which we know it to
possess. We think, for instanc