ge, radiant, bright-blue eyes beamed up
into his own, half languid still, but gleaming through their dewy
languor, with an expression which he must have been, indeed, blind to
mistake for aught but the strongest of unchanged, unchangeable
affection.

It was evident that she knew him now; that the momentary terror,
arising rather, perhaps, from fear than from superstition, which had
converted the young ardent soldier into a visitant from beyond those
gloomy portals through which no visitant returns, had passed from her
mind, and that she had already recognized, although she spoke not, her
living lover.

And though she recognized him, she sought not to withdraw herself from
the enclosure of his sheltering arms, but lay there on his bosom, with
her head reclined on his shoulder, and her eyes drinking long draughts
of love from his fascinated gaze, as if she were his own, and that her
appropriate place of refuge and protection.

"Oh! Raoul," she exclaimed, at length, in a low, soft whisper, "is it,
indeed, you--you, whom I have so long wept as dead--you, whom I was
even now weeping as one lost to me forever, when you are thus restored
to me!"

"It is I, Melanie," he answered mournfully, "it is I, alive, and in
health; but better far had I been in truth dead, as they have told
you, rather than thus a survivor of all happiness, of all hopes;
spared only from the grave to know _you_ false, and myself forgotten."

"Oh, no, Raoul, not false!" she cried wildly, as she started from his
arms, "oh, not forgotten! think you," she added, blushing crimson,
"that had I loved any but you, that had I not loved you with my whole
heart and being, I had lain thus on your bosom, thus endured your
caresses? Oh, no, no, never false! nor for one moment forgotten?"

"But what avails it, if you do love no other--what profits it, if you
do love me? Are you not--are you not, false girl,--alas! that these
lips should speak it,--the wife of another--the promised mistress of
the king?"

"I--I--Raoul!" she exclaimed, with such a blending of wonder and
loathing in her face, such an expression of indignation on her tongue,
that her lover perceived at once, that, whatever might be the infamy
of her father, of her husband, of this climax of falsehood and
self-degradation, she, at least, was guiltless.

"The mistress of the king! what king? what mean you? are you
distraught?"

"Ha! you are ignorant, you are innocent of that, then. You are not yet