While the ambassador's bag is steadily posting over
the hills of Burgundy with Mr. Clay's letter to Julia
Beverley, the reader must be content to gain a little
upon her majesty's courier and look in upon a family
party assembled in the terraced front of a villa in the
neighborhood of Fiesole. The evening was Italian
and autumnal, of a ripe, golden glory, and the air was
tempered to the blood, as daylight is to the eye—so
fitly as to be a forgotten blessing.

A well-made, well-dressed, robust gentleman, who
might be forty-five, or a well-preserved sixty, sat at a
stone table on the westward edge of the terrace. The
London Times lay on his lap, and a bottle of sherry
and a single glass stood at his right hand, and he was
dozing quietly after his dinner. Near a fountain below,
two fair English children played with clusters of
ripe grapes. An Italian nurse, forgetting her charge,
stood with folded arms leaning against a rough garden
statue, and looked vacantly at the sunset sky, while
up and down a level and flowering alley in the slope
of the garden, paced slowly and gracefully Mrs.
William Brown, the mother of these children, the
wife of the gentleman sleeping over his newspaper,
and the heroine of this story.

Julia Beverley had been married five years, and for
three years at least she had relinquished the habit of
dressing her fine person to advantage. Yet in that
untransparent sleeve was hidden an arm of statuary
roundness and polish, and in those carelessly fitted

[figure description] Page 015.[end figure description]

shoes were disguised feet of a plump diminutiveness
and arched instep worthy to be the theme of a new
Cenerentola. The voluptuous chisel of the Greek
never moulded shoulders and bust of more exquisite
beauty, yet if she had not become unconscious of the
possession of these charms altogether, she had so far
lost the vanity of her girlhood that the prudery of a
quakeress would not have altered a fold of her cashmere.
Her bonnet, as she walked, had fallen back,
and, holding it by one string over her shoulder, she
put away behind her “pearl-round ear” the dark and
heavy ringlet it had tangled in its fall, and, with its
fellow shading her cheek and shoulder in broken
masses of auburn, she presented a picture of luxurious
and yet neglected beauty such as the undress pencil
of Grenze would have revelled in portraying. The
care of such silken fringes as veiled her indolent eyes
is not left to mortals, and the covert loves who curve
these soft cradles and sleep in them, had kept Julia
Beverley's with the fidelity of fairy culture.

The Beverleys had married their daughter to Mr.
Brown with the usual parental care as to his fortune,
and the usual parental forgetfulness of everything else.
There was a better chance for happiness, it is true,
than in most matches of convenience, for the bridegroom,
though past his meridian, was a sensible and
very presentable sort of man, and the bride was naturally
indolent, and therefore likely to travel the road
shaped out for her by the very marked hedges of expectation
and duty. What she had felt for Mr. Clay
during their casual and brief intimacy, will be seen by-and-by,
but it had made no barrier to her union with
Mr. Brown. With a luxurious house, fine horses,
and her own way, the stream of life, for the first year
of marriage, ran smoothly off. The second year was
chequered with misgivings that she had thrown herself
away, and nights of bitter weeping over a destiny
in which no one of her bright dreams of love seemed
possible to be realized, and still habit riveted its thousand
chains, her children grew attractive and attaching,
and by the time at which our story commences,
the warm images of a life of passionate devotion had
ceased to haunt her dreams, sleeping or waking, and
she bade fair to live and die one of the happy many
about whom “there is no story to tell.”

Mr. Brown at this period occupied a villa in the
neighborhood of Florence, and on the arrival of Mr.
Clay's letter at English Embassy, it was at once forwarded
to Fiesole, where it intruded like the serpent
of old on the domestic paradise to which the reader
has been introduced.

Weak and ill-regulated as was the mind of Mrs.
Brown, her first feeling after reading the ardent epistle
of Mr. Clay, was unmingled resentment at its freedom.
Her husband's back was turned to her as he sat on the
terrace, and, ascending the garden steps, she threw the
letter on the table.

“Here is a letter of condolence on your death,”
she said, the blood mantling in her cheek, and her
lips arched into an expression of wounded pride and
indignation.

Alas for the slight pivot on which turns the balance
of destiny—her husband slept!

“William!” she said again, but the tone was fainter
and the hand she raised to touch him, stayed suspended
above the fated letter.

Waiting one instant more for an answer, and bending
over her husband to be sure that his sleep was real,
she hastily placed the letter in her bosom, and, with
pale brow and limbs trembling beneath her, fled to
her chamber. Memory had required but an instant
to call up the past, and in that instant, too, the honeyed
flatteries she had glanced over in such haste, had
burnt into her imagination, effacing all else, even the
object for which he had written, and the reproaches
he had lavished on her unfaithfulness. With locked
doors, and curtains dropped between her and the
glowing twilight, she reperused the worshipping
picture of herself, drawn so covertly under the semblance
of complaint, and the feeling of conscious
beauty so long forgotten, stole back into her veins
like the reincarnation of a departed spirit. With a
flashing glance at the tall mirror before her, she stood
up, arching her white neck and threading her fingers
through the loosened masses of her hair. She felt
that she was beautiful—still superbly beautiful. She
advanced to the mirror.

Her bright lips, her pliant motion, the smooth transparence
of her skin, the fulness of vein and limb, all
mingled in one assurance of youth, in a wild desire
for admiration, in a strange, restless, feverish impatience
to be away where she could be seen and
loved—away to fulfil that destiny of the heart which
seemed now the one object of life, though for years
so unaccountably forgotten!

“I was born to be loved!” she wildly exclaimed,
pacing her chamber, and wondering at her own beauty
as the mirror gave back her kindling features and
animated grace of movement; “How could I have
forgotten that I was beautiful?” But at that instant
her husband's voice, cold, harsh, and unimaginative,
forced its way to her ear, and, convulsed with a
tumultuous misery, she could neither struggle with
nor define, she threw herself on her bed and abandoned
herself to an uncontrolled agony of tears.

Let those smile at this paroxysm of feeling whose
“dream has come to pass!” Let those wonder who
have never been startled from their common-place
existence with the heart's bitter question—Is this all!

Reader! are you loved?—loved as you dreamed in
youth you might and must be—loved by the matchless
creature you painted in your imagination, lofty-hearted,
confiding, and radiantly fair? Have you spent your
treasure? Have you lavished the boundless wealth
of your affection? Have you beggared heart and
soul by the wild abandonment to love, of which you
once felt capable?

Lady! of you I ask: Is the golden flow of your
youth coined as it melts away? Are your truth and
fervor, your delicacy and devotedness, your unutterable
depths of tenderness and tears—are they named
on another's lips?—are they made the incense to
Heaven of another's nightly prayer?—Your beauty
is in its pride and flower. Who lays back with idolatrous
caress the soft parting of your hair? Who
smiles when your cheek mantles, and shudders when
it is pale?—Who sits with your slender fingers clasped
in his, — dumb because there are bounds to language,
and trembling because death will divide you?
Oh, the ray of light wasted on the ocean, and the ray
caught and made priceless in a king's diamond—the
wild-flower perishing in the woods, and its sister culled
for culture in the garden of a poet—are not wider
apart in their destiny than the loved and the neglected!—
“Blessed are the beloved,” should read a new
beatitude—“for theirs is the foretaste of Paradise!”