rew its shadow over the sunshine of truth, and Jealousy,
doubting, yet adoring still, would be welcomed as household guests, if
the attendants of this impassioned love. Such was the dream of my
girlhood.

When we entered the lawn, lights began to glimmer in the house. I
trembled at the idea of meeting Mrs. Linwood, or the Amazonian Meg.
There was a side door through which I might pass unobserved, and by this
ingress I sought my chamber and locked the door. A lamp was burning on
the table. Had I lingered abroad so late? Had the absence of Ernest been
observed?

I sat down on the side of the bed, threw off my bonnet and scarf, shook
my hair over my shoulders, and pushed it back with both hands from my
throbbing temples. I wanted room. Such crowding thoughts, such
overflowing emotions, could not be compressed in those four walls. I
rose and walked the room back and forth, without fear of being
over-heard, on the soft carpet of velvet roses. What revelations had
been made known to me since I had quitted that room! How low I had been
degraded,--how royally exalted! A child unentitled to her father's
name!--a maiden, endowed with a princely heart! I walked as one in a
dream, doubting my own identity. But one master thought governed every
other.

"He loves me!" I repeated to myself. "Ernest Linwood loves me! Whatever
be the future, that present bliss is mine. I have tasted woman's
highest, holiest joy,--the joy of loving and being beloved. Sorrow and
trial may be mine; but this remembrance will remain, a blessed light
through the darkness of time,--'a star on eternity's ocean.'"

As I passed and repassed the double mirror, my reflected figure seemed
an apparition gliding by my side, I paused and stood before one of them,
and I thought of the time when, first awakened to the consciousness of
personal influence, I gazed on my own image. Some writer has said, "that
every woman is beautiful when she loves." There certainly is a light,
coming up from the enkindled heart, bright as the solar ray, yet pure
and soft as moonlight, which throws an illusion over the plainest
features and makes them for the moment charming. I saw the flower-girl
of the library in the mirror, and then I knew that the artist had
intended her as the idealization of Love's image.

And then I remembered the morning when we sat together in the library,
and he took the roses from my basket and scattered the leaves at my
feet.

CHAPTER XXVI.

A