ed in being as happy as he could
possibly be, their circle was large enough, and it contained elements
enough--except only, perhaps, the _reveille_ that was wanting for the
apparently slumbering heart of Stephania.

A month after my first call upon the Wangraves, I joined them on their
journey to Vallambrosa, where they proposed to take refuge from the
sultry coming of the Italian autumn. My happiness would not have been
arranged after the manner of this world's happiness, if I had been the
only addition to their party up the mountain. They had received with
open arms, a few days before leaving Lucca, a young man from the
neighborhood of their own home, and who, I saw with half a glance, was
the very Eidolon and type of what Mr. Wangrave would desire as a
fitting match for his daughter. From the allusions to him that had
preceded his coming, I had learned that he was the heir to a brilliant
fortune, and was coming to his old friends to be congratulated on his
appointment to a captaincy in the Queen's Guards--as pretty a case of
an "irresistible" as could well have been compounded for expectation.
And when he came--the absolute model of a youth of noble beauty--all
frankness, good manners, joyousness, and confidence, I summoned
courage to look alternately at Stephania and him, and the hope, the
daring hope that I had never yet named to myself, but which was
already master of my heart, and its every pulse and capability,
dropped prostrate and lifeless in my bosom. If he did but offer her
the life-minute of love, of which I would give her, it seemed to me,
for the same price, an eternity of countless existences--if he should
but give her a careless word, where I could wring a passionate
utterance out of the aching blood of my very heart--she must needs be
his. She would be a star else that would resign an orbit in the fair
sky, to illumine a dim cave; a flower that would rather bloom on a
bleak moor, than in the garden of a king--for, with such crushing
comparisons, did I irresistibly see myself as I remembered my own
shape and features, and my far humbler fortunes than his, standing in
her presence beside him.

Oh! how every thing contributed to enhance the beauty of that young
man. How the mellow and harmonizing tenderness of the light of the
Italian sky gave sentiment to his oval cheek, depth to his gray-blue
eye, meaning to their overfolding and thick-fringed lashes. Whatever
he said with his finely-cut lips, was _lo