for us yet: our misery
is past; you will live, live to bless me in riches, as you have done in
want."

Isabel raised her eyes to his, and a smile, sweet, comforting, and
full of love, passed the lips which were about to close forever. "Thank
Heaven," she murmured, "for your dear sake. It is pleasant to die now,
and thus;" and she placed the hand that was clasped in her relaxing and
wan fingers within the bosom which had been for anguished and hopeless
years his asylum and refuge, and which now when fortune changed, as if
it had only breathed in comfort to his afflictions, was for the first
time and forever to be cold,--cold even to him!

"You will live, you will live," cried Mordaunt, in wild and incredulous
despair, "in mercy live! You, who have been my angel of hope, do not,--O
God, O God! do not desert me now!"

But that faithful and loving heart was already deaf to his voice,
and the film grew darkening and rapidly over the eye which still with
undying fondness sought him out through the shade and agony of death.
Sense and consciousness were gone, and dim and confused images whirled
round her soul, struggling a little moment before they sank into the
depth and silence where the past lies buried. But still mindful of him,
and grasping, as it were, at his remembrance, she clasped, closer and
closer, the icy hand which she held, to her breast. "Your hand is cold,
dearest, it is cold," said she, faintly, "but I will warm it here!" And
so her spirit passed away, and Mordaunt felt afterwards, in a lone and
surviving pilgrimage, that her last thought had been kindness to him,
and that her last act had spoken forgetfulness even of death in the
tenderness of love!

CHAPTER LIX

Change and time take together their flight.--Golden Violet.

One evening in autumn, about three years after the date of our last
chapter, a stranger on horseback, in deep mourning, dismounted at the
door of the Golden Fleece, in the memorable town of W----. He walked
into the taproom, and asked for a private apartment and accommodation
for the night. The landlady, grown considerably plumper than when we
first made her acquaintance, just lifted up her eyes to the stranger's
face, and summoning a short stout man (formerly the waiter, now the
second helpmate of the comely hostess), desired him, in a tone which
partook somewhat more of the authority indicative of their former
relative situations than of the obedience which should have
cha