it was,
this garden had been cultivated with some care, and was not devoid
of variety. A high and very thick fence of living box-wood, closely
interlaced with the honeysuckle and the common rose, screened a few
plots of rarer flowers, a small circular fountain, and a rustic arbour,
both from the sea breezes and the eyes of any passer-by, to which the
open and unsheltered portion of the garden was exposed. When I passed
through the opening cut in the fence, I was somewhat surprised at not
immediately seeing Isora. Perhaps she was in the arbour. I approached
the arbour trembling. What was my astonishment and my terror when I
beheld her stretched lifeless on the ground!

I uttered a loud cry, and sprang forward. I raised her from the earth,
and supported her in my arms; her complexion--through whose pure
and transparent white the wandering blood was wont so gently, yet
so glowingly, to blush, undulating while it blushed, as youngest
rose-leaves which the air just stirs into trembling--was blanched into
the hues of death. My kisses tinged it with a momentary colour not its
own; and yet as I pressed her to my heart, methought hers, which seemed
still before, began as if by an involuntary sympathy, palpably and
suddenly to throb against my own. My alarm melted away as I held her
thus,--nay, I would not, if I could, have recalled her _yet_ to life; I
was forgetful, I was unheeding, I was unconscious of all things else,--a
few broken and passionate words escaped my lips, but even they ceased
when I felt her breath just stirring and mingling with my own. It seemed
to me as if all living kind but ourselves had, by a spell, departed
from the earth, and we were left alone with the breathless and inaudible
Nature from which spring the love and the life of all things.

Isora slowly recovered; her eyes in opening dwelt upon mine; her blood
rushed at once to her cheek, and as suddenly left it hueless as before.
She rose from my embrace, but I still extended my arms towards her;
and words over which I had no control, and of which now I have no
remembrance, rushed from my lips. Still pale, and leaning against the
side of the arbour, Isora heard me, as--confused, incoherent, impetuous,
but still intelligible to her--my released heart poured itself forth.
And when I had ceased, she turned her face towards me, and my blood
seemed at once frozen in its channel. Anguish, deep ineffable anguish,
was depicted upon every feature; and when she s