burthened heart the double anguish of her fall, and of her approaching fate. Among the sweet fields and peaceful glens where they had lived so innocently, he brought her down to die; and pity, now powerful as love had been before, prompted every kindness of word and action that could soothe the bitterness of an early death, and an eternal parting from one she had never ceased to love. Nor was the approach of that death regarded with horror by the sinking young woman, but complacency: she would not have recovered for the world; have lived on to endure that living separation, (far worse than the eternal one,) which her feelings now would have enforced, in the event of her recovery; neither would she have married him, had he been willing, for the world. Now, as it was, as a dying creature, one half-disembodied and purified by the decay of her mortal nature, she felt that he might soothe her, as a brother, without the reproach of grossness from his own mind or others; might lead her forth to see the cows she could no longer milk, down in the dingle, or along the river banks, to enjoy the last of that summer, who was never to see another.

But

He looked the shadow of himself; his eyes wherever they turned, slowly as an aged man's, either there rested vacantly without regard, or wandered off indifferently on the glowing sky or the mere earth under foot alike, like one loathing everything he looked on, or unseeing and sickening at the sun. Margery was grown really delicately beautiful; her brow, neck, and arms were of such a bloodless lily hue, her cheek tinted with such a tender rose-bud blush, but ominously defined in its shape; her eyes so vivid, though shaded by a melancholy deep and dreadful to look on by me who had watched them ere her journey, dancing, at the approach of her lover, up the little river-side path, that, notwithstanding that gloom deep within them from a mourning soul, sickness and mortality were the last ideas her form excited. If her bodily fading away was thus piteously beautiful, the gentle beauty of her character developed itself still more for her fall; as the most lovely sunset is that which blushes deepest through the darkness of clouds through which it looks its last. He saw her patient, repentant, and resigned; and the more he saw of this beauty of the soul, with less patience could he bear the thought of soon seeing it no more for ever. Her gratitude for his forgiving constancy knew no bounds, as well as for the delicate honour with which he kept sacred her fatal secret from her parents and the squire. Her shame and selfabasement made her feel every the least attention from him as noble and generous: she received it with a starting tear, a timid smile, and such a pleased humbleness! There was only one token of attention she could no longer bear from him-a kiss! or rather the recollection it awoke of times when those lips had

been indeed "never breathed on by any but his," and subsequent times, too horrible for recollection, altogether overpowered her. She half met his, recoiled, pushed him from her, bore his hand to her lips instead; wept bitterly, laughed, shrieked, and became hysterical: Robin never ventured to press his lips to hers again. In all other respects they lived as fondest sister and brother in misfortune: it was the patient girl's sole joy and comfort to make him so many clothes as should long prevent his needing the needle or the wheel of another, and eagerly did she ply them in spite of weakness: for every restless night of coughing, that warned her of her shortening existence, the more earnestly would she apply to her work of love in the morning. Joy flashed through her pearly-white eyes, and flushed to a deeper dye the hectic colour of her cheek, every time she presented him with some new finished article of dress: it broke his heart to receive it, yet how could he damp her innocent pleasure by a refusal? Poor Robin received it without a word; he could not thank her for the choking in his throat, pressed her long thin hand, and hurried away to hide it somewhere, sacred but too mournful to be looked on. Nor these only, but every little future comfort which a fond wife leaving home on a short journey could think on for her husband, did she study to think and provide, as far as she could, for Robin during her eternal one; nor among the greater was a future wife for him forgotten, though of this she only spoke once, so violently did it affect him. For herself, she felt no sympathy in that emotion, for, cut off from him doubly as she felt herself in this world, both by her frailty and her hastening fate, she seemed to have done with every passion but that sainted one-a sister's love; with jealousy, with disappointment, with every feeling, every anxiety but to ensure his peace on earth, and her own with the God who was calling her to himself.

Poor Margery's life was, however, wonderfully prolonged through the winter, as if to fulfil the innocent wish of the milkmaid, "that she might die in the Spring to have store of flowers to stick about her windingsheet." That early Spring saw Robin seriously affected in his health by long watchings and sleepless nights of weeping; yet there was a something like calm and happiness in his intercourse with her now, that surprised while it perplexed and pleased her. But when she ventured again to hint at the "good young woman who she hoped to God would sometime sit spinning for him at her wheel;" he answered her with such a strange yet dark meaning smile, that it flashed explanation to her heart, on the sudden, of that mysterious new resignation he had evinced. In truth, his breathless inability to work or ascend a hill, his hollow eye and flushings in his cheek, had explained it before to others, though not to her whose thoughts had been riveted, as it were, to the idea of his surviving for a long

life of happiness, to reward him for his suffering through her and for her. From that moment, catching that new sad conceit of his, that of dying also, she exchanged the office of watcher with him, far gone as she was; watching every turn of his look, his pantings and short cough, with as much terrified tenderness as if she had had a long wedded life with him before her dependent on the event. Poor Robin! his was surely love! enjoying thus those feelings of mortal languor, otherwise so ungenial to sanguine youth. But he had prayed in the night to Heaven that he might not live to see her die, and those feelings, though not to be explained to others, yet well defined to himself, seemed like Heaven's acquiescence in that prayer. He saw too surely that her soul was on the point of flitting away, and his panted to follow; an eager lifeconsuming longing, that made food distasteful, rest needless, light wearying to his all absorbed senses, and by that very intensity of life-impatience, gave effect to its desire of release; as a poor bird by long beating against the bars of its cage, finds them at last giving way to that undesigned means of escape, though but the expression of its misery. His ceaseless anxiety of a beating heart so formed to itself a hope out of its despair. And now he could endure to see and even examine those little articles for use or ornament which she had made, and marked with her hair-now fast falling off, (the ominous dismantling of the soul's mansion. preparatory to its fall, marking consumption's last stage,) now that they were no longer associated with the cruel idea of his having a long life without her before him. In truth this despair, this intolerable horror of her death, was no sickness of imagination in that unfortunate young man, but the result of the soundest reason, and its coolest exercise. We have heard from his own lips, how feminine in spirit long intercourse with female gentleness had made him; how it had kept him apart from his own sex and their rougher pursuits: of course she who had as it were re-created his heart almost, had not failed to secure it hers for He was the child of nature, the creature of love; but she, his heart's parent, his nature's gentle nurse, she was leaving him for ever! the child was no more to know its mother. For what should he stay behind? to whom could he turn for those thousand sweetnesses she had imparted to his existence? from whom, were there one fond as she, could he bear to receive them? No: poor Robin knew himself, that his life's sole venture had been intrusted to her; she lost-that too was lost, and the world where she was not would be to him an empty world, a true grave of horrible vastness, and far more terrible than that narrow one already more than reconciled to his thought by the unresting agony life alone presented to his view. What wonder that when, at last, his disease (a rapid, as hers was a gradual, decline,) was confirmed; when it became no longer doubtful, that the dark journey she was to set out on so soon, she was not to take alone;

ever.

his heart felt comfort, and his spirits a sort of revival? I have compared him to a child under her love's influence; and he was like one whose mother has been preparing to leave it at home while she should go a journey: if, at last, the little drooping creature's holiday clothes be shewn it suddenly, assured that it shall not be left behind, how it brightens! wipes its sullen wet eyes to look at them! and loves them more than ever for that promise! The grave-clothes, the shroud, the flowers to be strewed on the dead, these the shocking images so long present to his mind's eye as ready to array her only for her departure, were as its new dress to that child, at once a surprise and a pleasure, when ready for himself and announcing that he was to depart also. On the poor invalid it had probably the effect of accelerating her fate, by adding to her other pains that of an ever gnawing self-reproach, with a pity intense to agony.

It was on a Sunday forenoon I was enjoying, on one of the green steep hills that enclose the valley where old Morgan's house stood, that deeper calm that seems to reign on that day than on others, even in such pastoral districts, the sound of a psalm chanted by several voices came, melancholy, in the stillness and blue of that height, from below. It was the singing always practised in Wales by those who walk with a corpse. "She is gone then," I said to myself; "poor Margery!" Looking down I could distinguish dimly the humble sort of bier, used in rustic funerals, resembling the black tilt of a small cart, borne by the hands, standing black on the turf before the farm door. I hastened down the banks, anxious to learn how poor Robin bore his long expected wrench of the heart. But my way wound down the other side of the precipice which faced Llan-, and before I reached there, the procession had been long on its way to the church, or even long enough for the eternal door to have been shut on the gentle penitent. The exterior of the little farm wore its usual sabbath appearance: the small fold contained the few horses at rest; round the door the broken pavement of rock had been swept over night, while, from within, not a sound came but the measured tick of the clock. The presence of despair is awful. I paused to nerve myself (before I pulled the latch string,) for the sight of the deserted Robin, who had been for some time little able to exert himself, and probably would be unable to the task of following the body, especially as the day was one of those that announce confirmed spring, or rather the birth of summer, so delicious, yet so enervating. I stood, listened, looked round the house end, and, to my surprise, caught a last glimpse of the sad cavalcade as it passed black over the last ridge of sheepwalk, before it became invisible by descent beyond. Was he watching too, at the back door, betwixt the orchard trees, on which it opened, that last he ever was to see in this world of his life's companion?

Curiosity overcame my awe, and I proceeded round to the back, under the fruit-trees in full blossom; the door stood wide open, as if some one had been within to enjoy the sunshiny orchard, its deep grass and cowslips, and the fine perfume, and the valley landscape sleeping so beautiful, as seen between the mossy trunks leaning and wreathing. Then first I distinguished a woman, who had acted as nurse occasionally, running towards her own cottage, whose thatch was visible though distant, on a wood's edge. In the farmer's own old wicker chair, with a great canopy directly facing that hill brow, whence the funeral had just disappeared, sate reclining back one from whom I almost recoiled as an apparition, so strongly had I been persuaded of her death: it was Margery, looking indeed that death; white, ghost-like, her hands clasped in her lap, and rolling her faint eyes evidently on that spot of sky and hill top, whence they missed that object.

I said rolling, but they had rolled their last! I missed the soul from them, though wide open, instantly; and the surprise was almost as shocking as would have been her actual apparition. I presently learned the whole from the cottage wife, who had run away, seeing her change, for help. Robin had died rather suddenly in her wasted arms tight-folded round his neck, and her lips-once more !-glued to his in that forgetful moment, to catch his last breath. When they bore his corpse away, she suffered an ecstacy of weeping agony at not being able to follow it to its long home. But she appeared a little soothed by being seated to watch it slowly moving up the sunny bank, till it neared that point of its evanishment, when she grew dreadfully agitated, which was the occasion of the attendant's departure. Doubtless she had died in the very moment of that last glimpse of the spectacle, which I too had witnessed, for I fancied she stirred once, and there was that fearful something in the glazing eye that proclaims at once the absence of a soul, and its recent presence, the meeting of life and death, a lingering light, and a dark trace of horror. Remorse too I fancied, certainly such a pain as innocent grief does not produce, was visible there, On her writhed, yet beautiful death's face, was a cast of features like sunken despair of self-reproach, as if her last words had been, as she gazed, "I have done this!"

All the clothes and little presents she had made for Robin were buried with him, and his grave, being reopened three days after, received her also, followed by the squire himself, the disconsolate old father, who felt he had lost two children, and many other real mourners. Nor would one of them have ever known, but for a curious and unlucky rencontre a year afterwards, that Margery Morgan did not go to her grave as stainless as the flowers they stuck above it, as pure in body as she certainly died in soul,