reflected upon their anxiety concerning her on the preceding night.  To her distress on that occasion they made not the slightest allusion; they felt it sufficient that the beloved of their hearts was well, and that from the evident flow of her spirits there existed no rational ground for any apprehension respecting her.  After breakfast she sat sewing for some time with her sisters, but it was evident that her mind was not yet sufficiently calm to permit her as formerly to sustain a proper part in their conversation.  Ever and anon they could observe by the singular light which sparkled in her eyes, as with a sudden rush of joy, that her mind, was engaged on some other topic, and this at a moment when some appeal or interrogatory to herself rendered such abstracted enjoyment more obvious.  Sensible, therefore, of her incompetency as yet to regulate her imagination so as to escape notice, she withdrew in about an hour to her own room, there once more to give loose to indulgence.

Our readers may perceive that the position of Jane Sinclair, in her own family, was not very favorable to the formation of a firm character.  The regulation of a mind so imaginative, and of feelings so lively and susceptible, required a hand of uncommon skill and delicacy.  Indeed her case was one of unusual difficulty.  In the first place, her meekness and extreme sweetness of temper rendered it almost impossible in a family where her own qualities predominated, to find any deviation from duty which might be seized upon without harshness as a pretext for inculcating those precautionary principles that were calculated to strengthen the weak points which her character may have presented.  Even those weak points, if at the time they could be so termed, were perceptible only in the exercise of her virtues, so that it was a matter of some risk, especially in the case of one so young, to reprove an excess on the right side, lest in doing so you checked the influence of the virtue that accompanied it.  Such errors, if they can be called so, when occurring in the conduct of those whom we love, are likely to call forth any thing but censure.  It is naturally supposed, and in general with too much truth, that time and experience will remove the excess, and leave the virtue not more than equal to the demands of life upon it.  Her mother, however, was, as the reader may have found, by no means ignorant of those traits a the constitution of her mind from which danger or happiness might ultimately be apprehended; neither did he look on them With indifference.  In truth, they troubled him much, and on more than one occasion he scrupled not fully to express his fears of, their result.  It was he, the reader perceives, who on the evening of her first interview with Osborne, gave so gloomy a tone to the feelings of the family, and impressed them at all events more deeply than they otherwise would have felt with a vague presentiment of some unknown evil that was to befall her.