est," said he; "I am so glad to see you, that I
will not scold you for your mysterious absence. This is your room, you
see your name over the door; it is a larger one than you used to have,
for you are a man now; and there is your German sanctum adjoining--for
Schiller and the meerschaum!--a bad habit that, the meerschaum! but
not worse than the Schiller, perhaps. You see you are in the peristyle
immediately. The meerschaum is good for flowers, I fancy, so have no
scruple. Why, my dear boy, how pale you are! Be cheered--be cheered.
Well, I must go myself, or you will infect me."

Cleveland hurried away; he thought of his lost friend. Ernest sank upon
the first chair, and buried his face in his hands. Cleveland's valet
entered, and bustled about and unpacked the portmanteau, and arranged
the evening dress. But Ernest did not look up nor speak; the first
bell sounded; the second tolled unheard upon his ear. He was thoroughly
overcome by his emotions. The first notes of Cleveland's kind voice had
touched upon a soft chord, that months of anxiety and excitement had
strained to anguish, but had never woke to tears. His nerves were
shattered--those strong young nerves! He thought of his dead father when
he first saw Cleveland; but when he glanced round the room prepared for
him, and observed the care for his comfort, and the tender recollection
of his most trifling peculiarities everywhere visible, Alice, the
watchful, the humble, the loving, the lost Alice rose before him.
Surprised at his ward's delay, Cleveland entered the room; there sat
Ernest still, his face buried in his hands. Cleveland drew them gently
away, and Maltravers sobbed like an infant. It was an easy matter
to bring tears to the eyes of that young man: a generous or a tender
thought, an old song, the simplest air of music, sufficed for that touch
of the mother's nature. But the vehement and awful passion which belongs
to manhood when thoroughly unmanned--this was the first time in which
the relief of that stormy bitterness was known to him!

CHAPTER XIV.

"Musing full sadly in his sullen mind."--SPENSER.

"There forth issued from under the altar-smoke
A dreadful fiend."--_Ibid. on Superstition_.

NINE times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the
narrow gulf from Youth to Manhood. That interval is usually occupied
by an ill-placed or disappointed affection. We recover, and we find
ourselves a new being. The intellect has been