her lover and
that her head drooped upon his bosom.

"Isabel," he said, in a low, sweet tone, which to her ear seemed the
concentration of all earthly music,--"Isabel, look up,--my own, my
beloved,--look up and hear me. Perhaps you say truly when you tell me
that the possessions of my house shall melt away from me, and that my
relation will not offer to me the precarious bounty which, even if he
did offer, I would reject; but, dearest, are there not a thousand
paths open to me,--the law, the state, the army?--you are silent,
Isabel,--speak!"

Isabel did not reply, but the soft eyes which rested upon his told, in
their despondency, how little her reason was satisfied by the arguments
he urged.

"Besides," he continued, "we know not yet whether the law may not decide
in my favour: at all events years may pass before the judgment is given;
those years make the prime and verdure of our lives; let us not waste
them in mourning over blighted hopes and severed hearts; let us snatch
what happiness is yet in our power, nor anticipate, while the heavens
are still bright above us, the burden of the thunder or the cloud."

Isabel was one of the least selfish and most devoted of human beings,
yet she must be forgiven if at that moment her resolution faltered, and
the overpowering thought of being in reality his forever flashed upon
her mind. It passed from her the moment it was formed; and, rising from
a situation in which the touch of that dear hand and the breath of
those wooing lips endangered the virtue and weakened the strength of her
resolves, she withdrew herself from his grasp, and while she averted her
eyes, which dared not encounter his, she said in a low but firm voice,--

"It is in vain, Algernon; it is in vain. I can be to you nothing but a
blight or burden, nothing but a source of privation and anguish. Think
you that I will be this?--no, I will not darken your fair hopes and
impede your reasonable ambition. Go (and here her voice faltered for a
moment, but soon recovered its tone), go, Algernon, dear Algernon; and
if my foolish heart will not ask you to think of me no more, I can at
least implore you to think of me only as one who would die rather than
cost you a moment of that poverty and debasement, the bitterness of
which she has felt herself, and who for that very reason tears herself
away from you forever."

"Stay, Isabel, stay!" cried Mordaunt, as he caught hold of her robe,
"give me but one word more, an