assured that he slept soundly, and an irresistible desire arose in her
heart to draw near him, and look at him more closely than she had yet
ventured to do. She stood beside him; her heart bounded against the
locket, his gift, which lay in its accustomed place, as she marked with
a quick eye how the handsome but uncouth stripling had expanded into the
man of noble proportions, whose features had, like her own, acquired a
new character under the refining touch of intellect. Meeta looked on him
till her eyes grew dim with tears pressed from a heart full of emotion,
compounded of happy memories and glad hopes, shadowed by disappointment
and saddened by doubt. Above all other feelings, however, rose the
undying love which had "grown with her growth, and strengthened with her
strength." Suddenly, by an irrepressible impulse, she laid her hand
softly on the dark locks of waving hair which clustered over his broad
brow, and breathed in low, tender accents, "My Ernest!"

On leaving his father's room, Ernest had thrown himself on his hard
couch, not to sleep, but to rest; and when slumber overpowered him, he
had yielded to it unwillingly, and with the determination to be on the
alert and ready to arise on the first summons. Sleep that comes thus,
howsoever it may continue through other disturbing causes, rarely
resists a touch, or the sound of our own name, and light as was Meeta's
touch, and low as were her tones, Ernest was partially aroused by them.
He stirred, and she would have retreated noiselessly from his side, but
as his eyes unclosed, they fell upon her with an expression of such
rapturous love as she had never seen in them before, and in an instant
he had encircled her form with his arm, and drawn her to his bosom. In
glad surprise she rested there a moment; it was but a moment.

"Sophie--my Sophie!" were the murmured words that met her ear, and gave
her strength to burst from his embraces and glide rapidly, noiselessly
back into the darkened chamber. There, sheltered by the darkness, she
could see Ernest raise himself slowly up from his couch, look almost
wildly around him, and then seemingly satisfied that he had only
dreamed, sink back again to rest.

A dream it had indeed been to him; a shadow of the night; to Meeta a
dark cloud, in whose gloom she was henceforth to walk for ever. Hours of
conversation could not so fully have revealed the truth to Meeta as
those simple words: "Sophie--my Sophie!" uttered by Ernes