confidences with an indifferent
and weary air. This could not last.

One night--it was a little time before he left us--he begged me to walk
with him once more under the lindens. I made many excuses, but he
overruled them all. We left the brilliantly-lighted rooms and stood
beneath the solemn shadow of the trees. It was a warm, soft night; the
harvest moon shone down upon us; a south wind moaned among the
branches. We walked silently on till we reached a rustic seat, formed
of gnarled boughs fantastically bound together; here he made me sit
down and placed himself beside me.

"Juanita," he said, in a tone so soft, so thrillingly musical, that I
shall never forget it, "what has come between us? Are you no longer my
friend?"

I tried to answer him, and could not; love and grief choked my
utterance.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked. The moon shone full on his face; his eyes were bent on mine.
What a serpent-charm lurked in their treacherous blue depths! If,
looking at me thus, he had bidden me kill myself at his feet, I must
have done it.

"Juanita," he said, with a smile of conscious power, "you love me! But
why should that destroy our happiness?"

He held out his arms; I threw myself on his bosom in an agony of shame
and joy. Oh, Heaven! could it be possible that he loved me at last?

Long, long, we sat there in the moonlight, his arms around me, my hand
clasped in his. Poor hand! even by that faint radiance how dark and
thin it looked beside his, so white and rounded! How gloriously
beautiful was he! what a poor, pale shadow I! And yet he loved me! He
did not talk much of it; he spoke more of the future,--_our_ future. It
all lay before him, a bright, enchanted land, wherein we two should
walk together. We had not quite reached it, but we surely should, and
that ere long.

The steps toward it were prosaic enough, save as his imagination
brightened them. An early friend of his dead father, a distinguished
lawyer, wishing to further William's advancement in life, gave him the
opportunity of studying his profession with him,--offering him, at the
same time, a home in his own family. From these slender materials
William's fancy built air-castles the most magnificent. He would study
assiduously; with such a prize in view, he fondly said, his patience
would never weary. He felt within himself the consciousness of talent;
and talent and industry _must_ succeed. A bright career was before
him,--fame, fortune; and