efore the constant experience of the treachery, the coldness, the
ingratitude of men has given birth to universal doubt and general
distrust, the shadow vanishes as soon as the cloud which cast it is
withdrawn, and the sufferer again believes, alas! too often, only to
be again deceived.

Thus it was with St. Renan, who a few minutes before had given up even
the last hope, who had ceased, as he thought, to believe even in the
possibility of faith or honor among men, of constancy, or purity, or
truth in women, no sooner saw his Melanie, whom he knew to be the wife
of another, solitary and in tears, no sooner felt her inanimate form
reclining on his bosom, than he was prepared to believe any thing,
rather than believe her false.

Indeed, her consternation at his appearance, her evident dismay, not
unnatural in an age wherein skepticism and infidelity were marvelously
mingled with credulity and superstition, her clear conviction that it
was not himself in mortal blood and being, did go far to establish the
fact, that she had been deceived either casually or--which was far
more probable--by foul artifice, into the belief that her beloved and
plighted husband was no longer with the living.

The very exclamation which she uttered last, ere she sunk senseless
into his arms, uttered, as she imagined, in the presence of the
immortal spirit of the injured dead, "I am true, Raoul--true to the
last, my beloved!" rang in his ears with a power and a meaning which
convinced him of her veracity.

"She could not lie!" he muttered to himself, "in the presence of the
living dead! God be praised! she is true, and we shall yet be happy!"

How beautiful she looked, as she lay there, unconscious and insensible
even of her own existence. If time and maturity had improved Raoul's
person, and added the strength and majesty of manhood to the grace and
pliability of youth, infinitely more had it bestowed on the beauty of
his betrothed. He had left her a beautiful girl just blooming out of
girlhood, he found her a mature, full-blown woman, with all the flush
and flower of complete feminine perfection, before one charm has
become too luxuriant, or one drop of the youthful dew exhaled from the
new expanded blossom.

She had shot up, indeed, to a height above the ordinary stature of
women--straight, erect, and graceful as a young poplar, slender, yet
full withal, exquisitely and voluptuously rounded, and with every
sinuous line and swelling curv