for as she was in his eye the most beautiful, so was she in the moments
of self-examination, the best beloved. This, however, availed the
unhappy girl but little, with a man in whose character ambition was the
predominant impulse. To find himself beloved by a young and beautiful
woman of wealth and fashion was too much for one who possessed but
little firmness and an insatiable thirst after distinction. To
jostle men of rank and property out of his path, and to jostle them
successfully, when approaching the heart of an heiress, was too much for
the vanity of an obscure young man, with only a handsome person and
good talents to recommend him. The glare of fashionable life, and the
unexpected success of his addresses made him giddy, and despite an
ineffaceable conviction of dishonor and treachery, he found himself
husband to a rich heiress, and son-in-law to a baronet. And now was he
launched in fall career upon the current of fashionable dissipation,
otherwise called high life. This he might have borne as well as the
other votaries of polished profligacy, were it not for one simple
consideration--he had neither health nor constitution, nor, to do the
early lover of Jane Sinclair justice, heart for the modes and habits
of that society, through the vortices of which he now found himself
compelled to whirl. He was not, in fact, able to keep pace with the
rapid motions of his fashionable wife, and the result in a very
short time was, that their hearts were discovered to be anything
but congenial--in fact anything but united. The absence of domestic
happiness joined to that remorse which his conduct towards the
unassuming but beautiful object of his first affection entailed upon a
heart that, notwithstanding its errors, was incapable of foregoing
its own convictions, soon broke down the remaining stamina of his
constitution, and before the expiration of three months, he found
himself hopelessly smitten by the same disease which had been so fatal
to his family. His physicians told him that if there were any chance
of his recovery, it must be in the efficacy of his native air; and his
wife, with fashionable apathy, expressed the same opinion, and hoped
that he might, after a proper sojourn at home, be enabled to join her
early in the following season at Naples. Up to this period he had heard
nothing of the mournful consequences which his perfidy had produced
upon the intellect of our unhappy Jane. His father, who in fact still