untered at the orchard
gate--whose graver joys consisted in revelling in every poet that her
mother permitted her to read, or making her harp resound with wild,
sweet melody--whose laugh was still so unchecked and gay--that such a
being could think of love, of that fervid and engrossing passion, which
can turn the playful girl into a thinking woman, Mrs. Hamilton may be
pardoned if she deemed it as yet a thing that could not be; and she,
too, smiled at the playful mischief with which Emmeline would sometimes
claim the attention of young Myrvin, engage him in conversation, and
then, with good-humoured wit and repartee, disagree in all he said, and
compel him to defend his opinions with all the eloquence he possessed.

With Ellen, young Myrvin was more at his ease; he recalled the days that
were past, and never felt with her the barrier which his sensitive
delicacy had placed between himself and her cousins. Arthur was proud,
more so than he was aware of himself. He would have considered himself
more humbled to love and sue for one raised by fortune or rank above
him, than in uniting with one, who in both these essentials was his
inferior. He was ambitious, but for honours and station obtained by his
own endeavours not conferred by another. From his earliest youth he had
grown up with so strong an impression that he was intended for the
Church, that he considered it impossible any other profession could suit
him better. When he mingled intimately at college with young men of
higher rank and higher hopes, he discovered too late that a clergyman's
life was not such as to render him most happy; but he could not draw
back, he would not so disappoint his father. He felt and knew, to obtain
the summit of his desires, to be placed in a public situation, where his
ambition would have full scope, required a much larger fortune than his
father possessed. He clothed himself in what he believed to be
resignation and contentment, but which was in truth a morbid
sensitiveness to his lot in life, which he imagined poverty would
separate from every other. Association with Herbert Hamilton, to whom in
frankness he confided these secret feelings, did much towards removing
their bitterness; and the admiration which he felt for Herbert, whose
unaffected piety and devotion to the Church he could not fail to
appreciate, partially reconciled his ambitious spirit to his station.
Yet the exalted ideas of Herbert were not entirely shared by Arthur,