The rain poured in torrents from the broad leads and
Gothic battlements of — Castle, and the dull and
plashing echoes, sent up with steady reverberation
from the stone pavement of the terrace and courts,
lulled to a late sleep one of most gay and fashionable
parties assembled out of London. It was verging
toward noon, and, startled from a dream of music, by
the entrance of a servant, Ernest Clay drew back the
heavy bed-curtains and looked irresolutely around his
luxurious chamber. The coals in the bright fire
widened their smoking cracks and parted with an indolent
effort, the well-trained menial glided stealthily
about, arranging the preparations for the author's
toilet, the gray daylight came in grayer and softer
through the draped folds which fell over the windows,
and if there was temptation to get up, it extended no
farther than to the deeply cushioned and spacious
chair, over which was flung a dressing-gown of the
loose and flowing fashion, and gorgeous stuff of the
Orient.

“Thomas, what stars are visible to the naked eye
this morning?” said the couchant poet with a heavy
yawn.

“Sir!”

“I asked if Lady Grace was at breakfast?”

“Her ladyship took breakfast in her own room, I
believe, sir!”

“`Qualis rex, talis grex.' Bring mine!”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“I said I would have an egg and a spatchcock,
Thomas! And, Thomas, see if the duke has done
with the Morning Post.”

“I could have been unusually agreeable to Lady
Grace,” soliloquized the author, as he completed his
toilet; “I feel both gregarious and brilliant this
morning and should have breakfasted below. Strange
that one feels so dexterous-minded sometimes after a
hard drink!—Bacchus waking like Aurora! Thomas,
you forgot the claret! I could coin this efflux of
soul, now, into `burning words,' and I will. What
is the cook's name, Thomas? Gone? So has the
builder of this glorious spatchcock narrowly escaped
immortality! Fairest Lady Grace, the sonnet shall
be yours at the rebound! A sonnet? N—n—no!
But I could write such a love-letter this morning!
Morning Post. `Died at Brighton Mr. William
Brown.' Brown—Brown—what was that pretty girl's
name that married a Brown—a rich William Brown.
Beverley was her name—Julia Beverley—a flower for
the garden of Epicurus—a mate for Leontium! I
loved her till I was stopped by Mr. Brown—loved her?
by Jove, I loved her—as well as I loved anybody that
year. Suppose she were now the widow Brown? If
I thought so, faith! I would write her such a teminiscent
epistle—Why not as it is—on the supposition?
Egad, if it is not her William Brown, it is no
fault of mine. Here goes at a venture!

“To her who was Julia Beverley—

“Your dark eye rests on this once familiar handwriting.
If your pulse could articulate at this moment,
it would murmur he loved me well! He who writes to
you now, after years of silence, parted from you with
your tears upon his lips—parted from you as the last
shadow parts from the sun, with a darkness that must
deepen till morn again. I begin boldly, but the usage
of the world is based upon forgetfulness in absence,
and I have not forgotten. Yet this is not to be a love-letter.

“I am turning back a leaf in my heart. Turn to
it in yours! On a night in June, within the shadow
of the cypress by the fountain of Ceres, in the ducal
gardens of Florence, at the festa of the duke's birth-night,
I first whispered to you of love. Is it so writ in
your tablet? Or were those broken words, and those
dark tresses drooped on my breast, mockeries of a
night—flung from remembrance with the flowers you
wore? Flowers, said I? Oh, Heaven! how beautiful
you were with those lotus-stems braided in your hair,
and the white chalices gleaming through your ringlets
as if pouring their perfume over your shoulders!
How rosy-pale, like light through alabaster, showed
the cheek that shrank from me beneath the betraying
brightness of the moon! How musical above the
murmur of the fountain rose the trembling wonder
at my avowal, and the few faint syllables of forgiveness
and love. I strained you wildly to my heart! Oh,
can that be forgotten!

“With the news that your husband was dead, rushed
back these memories in a whirlwind. For one
brief, one delirious moment, I fancied you might yet
be mine. I write because the delirium is over. Had
it not been, I should be now weeping at your feet—
my life upon your lips!

“I will try to explain to you, calmly, a feeling that
I have. We met in the aisle of Santa Croce—
strangers. There was a winged lightness in your
step, and a lithe wave in the outline of your form, as
you moved through the sombre light, which thrilled
me like the awakening to life of some piece of aerial
sculpture. I watched you to your carriage, and returned
to trace that shadowy aisle for hours, breathing
the same air, and trying to conjure up to my imagination
the radiant vision lost to me, I feared, for ever.
That night your necklace parted and fell at my feet,
in the crowd at the Pitti, and as I returned the warm
jewel to your hand, I recognised the haunting features
which I seemed to live but to see again. By the first
syllable of acknowledgment I knew you—for in your
voice there was that profound sweetness that comes

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only from a heart thought-saddened, and therefore
careless of the cold fashion of the world. In the embayed
window looking out on the moonlit terrace of
the garden, I joined you with the confidence of a
familiar friend, and in the low undertone of earnest
and sincerity we talked of the thousand themes with
which the walls of that palace of pilgrimage breathe
and kindle. Chance-guided and ignorant even of
each other's names, we met on the galleries of art, in
the gardens of noble palaces, in the thronged resorts
open to all in that land of the sun, and my heart
expanded to you like a flower, and love entered it with
the fulness of light. Again, I say, we dwelt but upon
themes of intellect, and I had not breathed to you of
the passion that grew hour by hour.

“We met for the last time on the night of the duke's
festa—in that same glorious palace where we had first
blended thought and imagination, or the wondrous
miracles of art. You were sad and lower-voiced than
even your wont, and when I drew you from the crowd,
and wandering with you through the flowering alleys
of the garden, stood at last by that murmuring fountain,
and ceased suddenly to speak—there was the threshold
of love. Did you forbid me to enter? You fell on
my bosom and wept!

“Had I brought you to this by love-making? Did
I flatter or plead my way into your heart? Were you
wooed or importuned? It is true your presence drew
my better angel closer to my side, but I was myself—
such as your brother might be to you—such as you
would have found me through life; and for this—for
being what I was—with no art or effort to win affection,
you drew the veil from between us—you tempted
from my bosom the bird that comes never back—you
suffered me to love you, helplessly and wildly, when
you knew that love such as mine impoverishes life
for ever. The only illimitable trust, the only boundless
belief on earth, is first love! What had I done to
be robbed of this irrecoverable gem—to be sent wandering
through the world, a hopeless infidel in woman?

“I have become a celebrity since we parted, and
perhaps you have looked into my books, thinking I
might have woven into some one of my many-colored
woofs the bright thread you broke so suddenly. You
found no trace of it, and you thought, perhaps, that
all memory of those simpler hours was drowned in the
intoxicating cup of fame. I have accounted in this
way for your never writing to cheer or congratulate
me. But if this conjecture be true, how little you
know the heart you threw away—how little you know
of the thrice-locked, light-shining, care-hidden casket
in which is treasured up the refused gold of a first
love. What else is there on earth worth hiding and
brooding over? Should I wing such treasures with
words and lose them?

“And now you ask, why, after years of healing
silence, I open this wound afresh, and write to you.
Is it to prove to you that I love you?—to prepare the
way to see you again, to woo and win you? No—
though I was worthy of you once! No—though I
feel living in my soul a passion that with long silence
and imprisonment has become well-nigh uncontrollable.
I am not worthy of you now! My nature is
soiled and world-polluted. I am prosperous and
famous, and could give you the station you never
won, though you trod on my heart to reach it—but
the lamp is out on my altar of truth—I love by my
lips—I mock at faith—I marvel at belief in vows or
fidelity—I would not trust you, no, if you were mine,
I would not trust you though I held every vein of
your bosom like a hound's leash. Till you can rebuke
whim, till you can chain imagination, till you
can fetter blood, I will not believe in woman. Yet this
is your work!

“Would you know why I write to you? Why has
God given us the instinct of outcry in agony, but to
inflict on those who wound us a portion of our pain?
I would tell you that the fire you kindled so wantonly
burns on—that after years of distracting ambition,
fame, and pleasure, I still taste the bitterness you
threw into my cup—that in secret when musing on
my triumphs, in the crowd when sick with adulation,
in this lordly castle when lapt in luxury and regard—
in all hours and phazes of a life brilliant and exciting
above that of most men, I mourn over that betrayed
affection, I see that averted face, I worship in bitter
despair that surpassing loveliness which should have
been mine in its glory and flower.

“I have made my moan. I have given voice to
my agony. Farewell!”

When Mr. Clay had concluded this “airing of his
vocabulary,” he enclosed it in a hasty note to his
friend, the secretary of legation at the court of
Tuscany, requesting him to call on “two abominable
old maids, by the name of Buggins or Bridgins,” who
represented the scan. mag. of Florence, and could
doubtless tell him how to forward his letter to “the
Browns;” and the castle-bell sounding as he achieved
the superscription, he descended to lunch, very much
lightened of his ennui, but with no more memory of
the “faithless Julia,” than of the claret which had
supplied some of the “intensity” of his style. The
letter—began as a mystification, or, if it had an object
beyond the amusement of an idle hour, intended as a
whimsical revenge for Miss Beverley's preference of
a rich husband to her then undistinguished admirer—
had, in the heat of composition, and quite unconsciously
to Clay, enlisted real feelings, totally disconnected
with the fair Julia, but not the less easily fused
into shape and probability by the facile alchymy of
genius. The reader will see at once that the feelings
expressed in it could never be the work of imagination.
Truth and bitter suffering show through every line,
and all its falsehood or fancy lay in its capricious address
to a woman who had really not the slightest
share in contributing to its material. The irreparable
mischief it occasioned, will be seen in the sequel.