She trembled as she looked up into his face and read it for a moment.  “You are too much of a gentleman to speak as you have, unless it came from your heart.  O my God! is this reality, or am I dreaming?” She drooped her head upon his shoulder, and said:  “’Whither thou goest I will go; thy house shall be my house, and thy God my God.’”

The full moon was just above the horizon, and the long dark shadows veiled them from view.  The judge rode in at the gate, and leaving his horse, went directly into the house.  A moment after a carriage drove into the court, and from it dismounted the brother-in-law sot and her weird sister; for indeed she was a very Hecate in looks and mischief.  Alice stole away to her chamber; and the happy stranger to wander among the shrubs, regardless of the damp and chill.

Here were two young hearts conscious of happiness; but was it a happiness derived from the respective merits and congenial natures of the two known to each other?  They were comparatively strangers, knowing little of the antecedents of each other.  Each was unhappily situated—­the one from poverty, the other owing to her wealth; the one ardently desirous of bettering pecuniarily his position, the other to release herself from restraints that were tyrannical and to enjoy that independence which she felt was her natural right.  Might not these considerations override the purer impulses of the heart arising from that regard for qualities which win upon the mind until ripened first into deep respect, then mellowed into tender affection by association protracted and intimate?  They had been reared in societies radically different:  their early impressions were equally antagonistic; but their aims were identical—­to escape from present personal embarrassments.

They had met romantically.  He had been removed for many months from the presence of civilized society, though naturally fond of female association, and craving deeply in his heart the communion again of that intercourse, which had (as he had learned from sad experience) been the chief cause of the happiness of his youth.  He met her first as he entered anew the relations of civilized and social society.  She was young and exquisitely beautiful.  Their meeting was but for a moment; their intercourse was intensely delightful to him, and the interest her ardent nature manifested toward him was extremely captivating.  He had gone from her, with her in all his heart.

She for the time was free.  She felt not the restraint of her female relatives, and the ardor of her heart burned out in the delighted surprise she experienced in the gentle and genial bearing of one to all seeming rude and uncultivated as the savage he so much resembled in the contour of his apparel.  She had trembled with a strange ecstasy as he strolled by her side, and felt a thrill pierce her soul as she looked into his face and saw what she had never seen, beaming in his eyes.  She had never seen it before; yet she