On the day before his departure the friends and relations of the family assembled to hold their farewell meeting.  The same spirit which marked all their rustic symposia presided in this; if we except a feeling of sorrow natural to his family on being separated from one they loved so affectionately.  Denis, who was never deficient in warmth of feeling, could not be insensible to the love and pride with which his family had always looked upon him.  Ambition, as he approached it, lost much of its fictitious glitter.  A sense of sorrow, if not of remorse, for the fastidious and overbearing spirit he had manifested to them, pressed upon his heart.  Pride, in fact, was expelled; nature resumed her empire over him; he looked upon the last two months of his life as a man would be apt to do who had been all that time under the dominion of a feverish dream.  We do not say, however, that either ambition or superstition was thoroughly expelled from his mind; for it is hard at all times to root them out of the system of man:  but they ceased to govern him altogether.  A passion, too, as obstinate as either of them, was determined to dispute their power.  The domestic affections softened his heart; but love, which ambition left for dead, was only stunned; it rose again, and finding a favorable position, set its seal to his feelings.

Denis himself, some days before that appointed for his departure, became perfectly conscious that his affections were strongly fixed upon Susan Connor.  The nature of their last interview filled him with shame; nay, more, it inspired him with pity for the fair, artless girl whom he had so unfeelingly insulted.  The manner in which he had won her young affections; the many tender interviews that had passed between them; the sacred promises of unchangeable love they had made to each other:  all crowded to his imagination with a power which reduced his spiritual ambition and ecclesiastical pride, at least to the possession only of a divided empire.  He had, therefore, with his book in his hand as usual, taken many solitary walks for the preceding few days, with the expectation of meeting Susan.  He heard that for the last month or six weeks she had looked ill, been in low spirits, and lost her health.  The cause of this change, though a secret to the world, was known to him.  He knew, indeed, that an interview between them was indispensable; but had it not been so, we question whether he would have been able to leave home without seeing her.

His evening strolls, however, up until the day before his setting out for college, were fruitless.  Susan, who heretofore had been in the habit of walking in the evenings among the green dells around her father’s house, was ever since their last meeting almost invisible.  In the meantime, as the day before that of his leaving the neighborhood had arrived, and as an interview with her was, in a religious point of view, essentially necessary, he took his book in the course of the evening,