hes are! Ah, you are looking on
that picture; it is of her who supplied your daughter's place,--she
is so beautiful, so good, you will love her as a daughter. Oh,
that letter--that--that letter--I forgot it till now--it is at the
vicarage--I must go there immediately, and you will come too,--you will
advise us."

"Alice, I have read the letter,--I know all. Alice, sit down and hear
me,--it is you who have to learn from me. In our young days I was
accustomed to tell you stories in winter nights like these,--stories
of love like our own, of sorrows which, at that time, we only knew by
hearsay. I have one now for your ear, truer and sadder than they were.
Two children, for they were then little more--children in ignorance
of the world, children in freshness of heart, children almost in
years--were thrown together by strange vicissitudes, more than eighteen
years ago. They were of different sexes,--they loved and they erred. But
the error was solely with the boy; for what was innocence in her was but
passion in him. He loved her dearly; but at that age her qualities were
half developed. He knew her beautiful, simple, tender; but he knew not
all the virtue, the faith, and the nobleness that Heaven had planted in
her soul. They parted,--they knew not each other's fate. He sought her
anxiously, but in vain; and sorrow and remorse long consumed him, and
her memory threw a shadow over his existence. But again--for his love
had not the exalted holiness of hers (_she_ was true!)--he sought to
renew in others the charm he had lost with her. In vain,--long, long in
vain. Alice, you know to whom the tale refers. Nay, listen yet. I have
heard from the old man yonder that you were witness to a scene many
years ago which deceived you into the belief that you beheld a rival. It
was not so: that lady yet lives,--then, as now, a friend to me; nothing
more. I grant that, at one time, my fancy allured me to her, but my
heart was still true to thee."

"Bless you for those words!" murmured Alice; and she crept more closely
to him.

He went on. "Circumstances, which at some calmer occasion you shall
hear, again nearly connected my fate by marriage to another. I had then
seen you at a distance, unseen by you,--seen you apparently surrounded
by respectability and opulence; and I blessed Heaven that your lot, at
least, was not that of penury and want." (Here Maltravers related where
he had caught that brief glimpse of Alice,*--how he had sought