heart that threw its rose hues over the face of nature, the sweet, mysterious rapture arising from love’s first dream; which can never be described by mortal pen; and never, while it lasts, can be spoken of by living tongue. While it lasts.  It never does last.  It is the one sole ecstatic phase of life, the solitary romance stealing in once, and but once, amidst the world’s hard realities; the “fire filched for us from heaven.”  Has it to arise yet for you—­you, who read this?  Do not trust it when it comes, for it will be fleeting as a summer cloud.  Enjoy it, revel in it while you hold it; it will lift you out of earth’s clay and earth’s evil with its angel wings; but trust not to its remaining:  even while you are saying, “I will make it mine for ever,” it is gone.  It had gone for Lucy Tempest.  And, oh! better for her, perhaps, that it should go; better, perhaps, for all; for if that sweet glimpse of paradise could take up its abode permanently in the heart, we should never look, or wish, or pray for that better paradise which has to come hereafter.

But who can see this in the sharp flood tide of despair?  Not Lucy.  In losing Lionel she has lost all; and nothing remained for her but to do battle with her trouble alone.  Passionately and truly as Lionel had loved Sibylla; so, in her turn, did Lucy love him.

It is not the fashion now for young ladies to die of broken hearts—­as it was in the old days.  A little while given to “the grief that kills,” and then Lucy strove to arouse herself to better things.  She would go upon her way, burying all feelings within her; she would meet him and others with a calm exterior and placid smile; none should see that she suffered; no, though her heart were breaking.

“I will forget him,” she murmured to herself ten times in the day.  “What a mercy that I did not let him see I loved him!  I never should have loved him, but that I thought he—­Psha! why do I recall it?  I was mistaken; I was stupid—­and all that’s left to me is to make the best of it.”

So she drove her thoughts away, as Lionel did.  She set out on her course bravely, with the determination to forget him.  She schooled her heart, and schooled her face, and believed she was doing great things.  To Lionel she cast no blame—­and that was unfortunate for the forgetting scheme.  She blamed herself; not Lionel.  Remarkably simple and humble-minded, Lucy Tempest was accustomed to think of every one before herself.  Who was she, that she should have assumed Lionel Verner was growing to love her?  Sometimes she would glance at another phase of the picture:  That Lionel had been growing to love her; but that Sibylla Massingbird had, in some weak moment, by some sleight of hand, drawn him to her again, extracted from him a promise that he could not retract.  She did not dwell upon this; she drove it from her, as she drove away, or strove to drive away, the other thoughts; although the theory, regarding the night of Sibylla’s return, was the favourite theory of Lady Verner.  Altogether, I say, circumstances were not very favourable towards Lucy’s plan of forgetting him.