and she rang
out "No!" the next morning, with a tone as little changed as a
convent-bell from matins to vespers, though it has passed meantime
through the furnace of an Italian noon.

Fanny was not a designing girl, either. She might have found a
wealthier customer for her heart than her cousin Philip. And she loved
this cousin as truly and well as her nature would admit, or as need be,
indeed. But two things had conspired to give her the unmalleable
quality just described--a natural disposition to confide, first and
foremost, on all occasions, in her own sagacity, and a vivid impression
made upon her mind by a childhood of poverty. At the age of twelve she
had been transferred from the distressed fireside of her mother, Mrs.
Bellairs, to the luxurious roof of her aunt, Mrs. Ballister, and, her
mother dying soon after, the orphan girl was adopted, and treated as a
child; but the memory of the troubled hearth at which she had first
learned to observe and reason, colored all the purposes and affections,
thoughts, impulses, and wishes of the ripening girl, and to think of
happiness in any proximity to privation seemed to her impossible, even
though it were in the bosom of love. Seeing no reason to give her
cousin credit for any knowledge of the world beyond his own experience,
she decided to think for him as well as love him, and, not being so
much pressed as the enthusiastic painter by the "_besoin d'aimer et de
se faire aimer_," she very composedly prefixed, to the possession of
her hand, the trifling achievement of getting rich--quite sure that if
he knew as much as she, he would willingly run that race without the
incumbrance of matrimony.

The death of Mr. Ballister, senior, had left the widow and her two boys
more slenderly provided for than was anticipated--Phil's portion, after
leaving college, producing the moderate income before mentioned. The
elder brother had embarked in his father's business, and it was thought
best on all hands for the younger Ballister to follow his example. But
Philip, whose college leisure had been devoted to poetry and painting,
and whose genius for the latter, certainly, was very decided, brought
down his habits by a resolute economy to the limits of his income, and
took up the pencil for a profession. With passionate enthusiasm, great
purity of character, distaste for all society not in harmony with his
favorite pursuit, and an industry very much concentrated and rendered
effective b