f-interrogation and self-distrust, the pain of a sensitive
spirit which doubts at every moment whether it may not be falling into
sin. The absence of her kind uncle at this time took from her the
strongest support on which she had leaned in her perplexities. Cheerful,
airy, and elastic in his temperament, always full of fresh-springing and
beautiful thoughts, as an Italian dell is of flowers, the charming old man
seemed, while he stayed with Agnes, to be the door of a new and fairer
world, where she could walk in air and sunshine, and find utterance for a
thousand thoughts and feelings which at all other times lay in cold
repression in her heart. His counsels were always so wholesome, his
sympathies so quick, his devotion so fervent and cheerful, that while with
him Agnes felt the burden of her life insensibly lifted and carried for
her as by some angel guide.

Now they had all come back upon her, heavier a thousand-fold than ever
they had been before. Never did she so much need counsel and
guidance,--never had she so much within herself to be solved and made
plain to her own comprehension; yet she thought with a strange shiver of
her next visit to her confessor. That austere man, so chilling, so awful,
so far above all conception of human weaknesses, how should she dare to
lay before him all the secrets of her breast, especially when she must
confess to having disobeyed his most stringent commands? She had had
another interview with this forbidden son of perdition, but how it was she
knew not. How could such things have happened? Instead of shutting her
eyes and turning her head and saying prayers, she had listened to a
passionate declaration of love, and his last word had called her his wife.
Her heart thrilled every time she thought of it; and somehow she could not
feel sure that it was exactly a thrill of penitence. It was all like a
strange dream to her; and sometimes she looked at her little brown hands
and wondered if he really had kissed them,--he, the splendid strange
vision of a man, the prince from fairyland! Agnes had never read romances,
it is true, but she had been brought up on the legends of the saints, and
there never was a marvel possible to human conception that had not been
told there. Princes had come from China and Barbary and Abyssinia and
every other strange out-of-the-way place, to kneel at the feet of fair,
obdurate saints who would not even turn the head to look at them; but she
had acted, she