around me say I
was sadly changed. It was all because I had grown cowardly and feared
even my own shadow. Oh, Arthur, I am not indeed what I was."

The solemnity, force and feeling with which Mildred gave utterance to
these words, strangely contrasted with the light and gay tone in which
she had commenced; but her thoughts had now fallen into a current that
bore her forward into one of those bursts of excited emotion, which were
characteristic of her temper, and which threw a peculiar energy and
eloquence into her manner. Butler, struck by the rising warmth of her
enunciation, and swayed in part by the painful reflections to which her
topic gave rise, replied, in a state of feeling scarcely less solemn
than her own--

"Ah, Mildred," and as he spoke, he parted her hair upon her pale
forehead and kissed it, "dearest girl, the unknown time to come has no
cup of suffering for me that I would not hold a cheap purchase for one
moment like this. Even a year of painful absence past, and a still more
solicitous one to come, may be gallantly and cheerfully borne when
blessed with the fleeting interval of this night. To hear your faith,
which though I never dwelt upon it but with a confidence that I have
held it most profane to doubt, still, to hear it avowed from your own
lips, now again and again, repeating what you have often breathed
before, and in letter after letter, written down, it falls upon my
heart, Mildred, like some good gift from heaven, specially sent to
revive and quicken my resolution in all the toils and labors that yet
await me. There must be good in store for such a heart as thine; and,
trusting to this faith, I will look to the future with a buoyant
temper."

"The future," said Mildred, as she lifted her eyes to the pale moon that
now sheeted with its light her whole figure, as she and her lover
strayed beyond the shade of the beech, "I almost shudder when I hear
that word. We live but in the present; that, Arthur, is, at least, our
own, poor as we are in almost all beside. That future is a perplexed and
tangled riddle--a dreadful uncertainty, in the contemplation of which I
grow superstitious. Such ill omens are about us! My father's inexorable
will, so headstrong, so unconscious of the pain it gives me; his rooted,
yes, his fatal aversion to you; my thraldom here, where, like a poor
bird checked by a cord, I chafe myself by fluttering on the verge of my
prison bounds; and then, the awful perils that cont