THE FIRST AND THE SECOND.

A SKET CII.

BY ROBERT A. WEST.

HORACE O'NEILE, though born and educated in the western world, was of Irish descent. He inherited from his parents all the peculiarities of his nation, elevated by the pure air of freedom and his association with its sons. Warm, generous, and sincere, and in person elegantly formed, he was the idol of his circle. Nature had been lavish to him of her favors, and education and refinement had completed the work. He possessed his country's quick susceptibility of insult, and its still keener sense of feeling. In all save his attachments, he was the sport of circumstances, sensitively alive to every shadow of neglect, to every shade of change. With these feelings he had loved-loved to distraction, with that intensity of passion which absorbs all the energies of soul and being. Adeline Vernon had at once. won her way to his heart, and he plunged into the vortex of the intoxicating passion-worshipping, in his heart's inmost citadel, the idol of his devotion. Adeline could love as fondly, but not as faithfully. While the love of O'Neile, like a beacon-light, always beamed on the same spot, her's, like the waves beneath, brightened for an instant in its lustre, and then dashed from its ray. "Twas not that she did not love, but that she did not love like Horace O'Neile. They parted! alas! what can chill an ardent heart like such a parting?

Among the most faithful of O'Neile's friends was a family where an only daughter shed the bright light of peace and happiness over the circle in which she moved. Amelia Au

bins was a timid, modest girl of seventeen, with a form of almost fairy lightness, and eyes of softest blue. The house of her father had been to O'Neile as a second home, and he loved Amelia as a sister; but what was her blushing cheek and her gentle voice to the commanding beauty, and fervid, passionate tones of Adeline Vernon? They were but as a pale moonlit landscape contrasted with the noontide splendor-a simple violet vieing with the rose. Yet there was happiness in the gentle courtesies of Amelia Aubins-and O'Neile's heart, though bruised, was not broken. He sought a balm for his lacerated affections-and with quiet alacrity Miss Aubins became his physician. Woe to the unwary leech who, in tending a patient, looks not to his own safety, and imbibes the infection!

Miss Aubins sat alone in her room; she looked at her watch; the finger pointed at the hour of nine. She almost fancied O'Neile late, although she was aware he could not present himself earlier. She was listless and unsettled; her embroidery was before her, her harp beside her, yet she neither sought to expedite the one, nor to awaken the other. "Time lags to-night," she murmured, when footsteps on the stairs quickened the pulses of her heart and deepened the roses on her cheeks. "It is certainly him-I know his step," she said mentally, when, as an attendant threw open the door, she turned to receive her aunt Woburn. Mrs. Woburn was precisely one of those who have a little sentimental sensibility to offer to all their acquaintance, and profound feeling to none. She did not perceive that Miss Aubins looked melancholy, for she did not actually weep, or that she was not at ease, for she spoke not of her nerves; and, neither seeing tears nor hearing complaints, was satisfied with seeing her niece alive and before her, and asked no questions.

Half an hour had elapsed, and Mrs. Woburn had departed, ere Horace O'Neile entered the room-and when he came, it was with a flushed cheek and fevered brow. Miss Aubins received him with an agitation which gave a double charm to her welcome. Words of kindness from female lips had ever been dear to Horace; and, as he bent over the hand

extended to him, his eye filled with the tear of memory, blended with somewhat of a sweeter feeling.

A conversation, sustained with difficulty on either side, at length died into a silence still more oppressive. Anxious to terminate the embarrassing stillness, Miss Aubins threw her hand across the chords of her harp. She was skilled in music; she knew well the tone of melancholy of the mourner she sought to soothe, and that strains of mirth were ill fitted to such a purpose. She therefore awoke sounds as mild and as sorrowing as his feelings-awoke them until her own soul seemed blending with the chords. Adeline Vernon had touched her harp for O'Neile in the days of their affection, but her's were the fearless flights of genius; the strings leaped beneath her fingers as though they were touched but to be forsaken. Amelia's was the very softening of the breeze as it fans the cheek of some slumbering infant; the chords seemed to woo the fingers that pressed them, and scarcely bounded from the touch. The one was the pealing of genius, the other the soul of sound.

As Miss Aubins bent over her instrument, O'Neile gazed earnestly upon her, and for the first time he felt that she was beautiful. "Adeline Vernon," he mused, "had a countenance more perfect; her eyes were of a deeper hue, and her cheeks more glowing, yet she lacked the placid, serene, and heavenly expression of Miss Aubins. Were mine a wandering heart, it is here that I would bid it rest for ever; but the hours of love are passed with me-withered, never to re-bloom." The reflection robbed him of a sigh. Amelia heard it, as it blended with the low, deep chords of her harp, and unwittingly looked up. A tear-the offspring of her own thoughtsglistened in her eye as it was turned on her companion, and with the suddenness of the motion, the tear fell upon her cheek.

"I can never love again," sighed O'Neile to himself, but the sigh was this time fainter, and the conviction weaker.

Horace O'Neile entered Mr. Aubins' drawing-room one morning with the first bitter smile that had ever curved it,

upon his lip. Amelia looked at him with pain; he was abstracted and unhappy. Something, she felt, had deepened the gloom of his spirit, which even the sunshine of her smile failed to dissipate, painful as had been the effort to force that smile.

"Bear with me, Miss Aubins," he said, as he became more and more conscious of his own abstraction; "bear with me, I implore you, and pity, but do not despise me!"

"Despise you, Mr. O'Neile!" echoed Amelia, as he arose, and with rapid but uncertain steps traversed the apartment. "Yes, I feel that I am indeed despicable," replied O'Neile, throwing a ticket upon the table to Miss Aubins-" a thing to scoff at, when such a toy as that can thus unman me!"

Amelia glanced at the ticket: "A masquerade," she exclaimed, "and the Countess de Brecon--the name is strange to me."

"And yet the goddess of the projected revel is far from being so," said O'Neile, in an accent, the forced composure of which made it heavy and unnatural. "Have you forgotten Miss Vernon, whose witcheries won a fond heart, and whose falsehood blighted it? She departed for Europe," he continued, heedless of the agitation of his auditor, and too proud to yield to his own; "she fled from America to learn forgetfulness of her own falsehood and of his folly whom it had wrecked, and she found the Lethe she sought in the affection of a Gallic lover. And now she has returned to New-York; and she, the idol of my once happy heart--the very dayspring of my existence she is the leader of these parti-colored revels. Pardon my emotion, Miss Aubins, for it is in vain that I strive to be the cold and senseless being that fashion should have made me. I see your astonishment--and oh," he added, pressing his hand upon his flushed and throbbing brow, "I would have concealed my weakness from you-I have done it long-I thought to do it always. I have borne much; I have smiled while I suffered-I have laughed amid my agony, while every nerve was strained to bursting. I have looked on you, Amelia-I have gazed on your calm and cloudless countenance, till I have almost deemed it impossible

not to imbibe its tranquillity. I have left you, and the cankerworm of memory and regret has again preyed upon my heart. Yet I have borne all this in silence. But, Miss Aubins, to see the woman you have adored, aye, worshipped as something heaven-born-her whose lips had uttered but the words of retirement and peace-to see her figure as a sultana or flower-girl! I think I could have forgiven her all but this, or I could have forgiven this in all but her. But I cannot forget how gentle, how pure, how devoted I once thought her. Yes--the last hold she had on my heart ist rent forever! She will not heed it-and to me it should, it shall be welcome emancipation. But, Miss Aubins, I am forgetting all save my own sorrows: grief is selfish. I meant to apologise for my vehemence, and I have only increased the necessity."

Amelia faltered out a few inarticulate words.

"I feel," pursued O'Neile, "all that you would say—all the kindness of your pardon. I read it in every feature of your countenance. Gentle, good, lovely as you are, may you never, never feel the bitterness of another's falsehood." He buried his face in his hands. "She was so artless, so tender, or I thought her so! Censure me not for this passion-gust, but reason with me, Miss Aubins, and I shall be convinced; but thus left to myself, I can only feel and suffer."

"Mr. O'Neile," said Miss Aubins, with a pale cheek, and in a tone of calm earnestness, "in making such a request, you invest me with an authority, of which, for your own sake, I shall avail myself. A moment of strong feeling has overthrown the resolute firmness of months. If you are thus the sport of circumstances, can you deem it strange that a woman is subject to the same weakness? Would you that she whose actions you now censure, should retain, when the wife of another, tastes and feelings which were of your own fostering, and but exotics to her heart? You are too honorable to entertain such a wish. If she has cast off every spell which yet clung around her spirit, and resigned her heart, untrammeled with the wreck of another passion, to her new