site prognostics, could have quarrelled even with his beloved, for founding her happiness on another's woe. Mr. Grosvenor, too, spoke disagreeably of his return to England, when all should be over, as if (failing that "bedeplorable contingency) all was indeed "over tween him and his daughter. "Let them talk and act as they like," said Frank to himself, indignantly, "while Walter lives and knows me, my post is by his couch. I may suffer for it, but repent it--never!" Change of place and scene was an expedient from which the sanguine mind of Frank expected much; and it was tried, but with slender success. Sir Walter continued to hang on for nearly two years, subject to periodical attacks of bodily disease, but awaking from each with clearer perceptions, and more intense enjoyment of his brother's almost filial attentions. Frank meantime, however, was suffering in health and spirits, from protracted anxiety, and the worse than dubious state of his own cherished hopes. Emma, whose letters had long been "few and far between," ceased to write. Rumour represented her as the cynosure of the world; gay and poor Frank began to fear, that come when they might, wealth and honours would be too late for happiness. Madame Epernay, to whose maternal bosom he had at length confided his secret uneasiness, took upon her the responsibility of peremptorily ordering him home, to look after the interests of his love; and the kind office of reconciling his brother to a temporary absence of him, in whose presence he literally seemed alone to live. "If I had a favourite rose tree, dear Chevalier," said she, "down in the garden, infested by insects, and exposed to dangerous blights, and which I was fearful of losing, would you not spare me gladly to water and look after it?" "Yes! that I would, ma bonne! and regret that I could not go with you to help you in your task, as I used to do when I was stronger." "Well, mon ami, Frank, when he came so hurriedly to see you, left a belle fiancée, a pretty little English girl, to wait till he was at leisure to come home and marry her." "He shall go directly and do it," said Sir Walter, interrupting her hastily. "No, mon cher, that he cannot do; for she has a villain papa who forbids it. Till she is twenty-one, a full year hence, she cannot make your brother as happy as he deserves to be. But it would make him easy in the meantime to go to England for a few days, and look after his rose, and see that no one plucks it in his absence, and leaves him nothing but the thorns. Don't you think he should do this,—you who know all about roses so well?" "About roses? Yes!" said the invalid, with his melancholy shake of the head. "About roses well! about love, nothing! But Frank does, and that will do for us both. come back soon. Oh, let him go directly, and bid him I shall not want him long. Before his full year' is out I shall have done with him." Sir Walter was now uneasy till his brother's departure; and how uneasy till his return, kind friends spared Frank the additional pain of hearing. Enough of that awaited him in England. He found Emma, as sad forebodings had presaged-faithless! Tired of the tantalizing fluctuations in Sir Walter's health, which all around her were interested in representing as likely to be indefinitely protracted-spoiled by the adulation of the great world, and unfitted for existence beyond its sphere-piqued at Frank for preferring his brother's sick bed to the personal cultivation of his interest in her heart (though his letters and conduct would have cherished a holier flame into imperishable brilliancy), the attractions which had at first captivated her fickle fancy, faded into oblivion before objects less worthy far, yet perhaps more congenial. Anxious to transfer to her parents some share in the blame of her own inconstancy, by marrying before the period of independence should arrive,—yet wilful as ever, even where the heart had little to say in the choice-she preferred to marry a more eligible suitor, a roué peer, of decided fashion, but broken fortunes, doubtful character, and dissipated habits, to whom her parents (and no one pitied them) would-ere the knot was actually tied—have in the bitterness of their hearts a thousand times preferred the pennyless, nay even prospect-less, Frank Lygon! When Frank heard this,- and it met him in the public prints on the very threshold of his countryhis first impulse was to re-embark, and abjure it for ever. But a second and manlier feeling determined him to complete the sacrifice he had already made to duty, by a painful but necessary visit to Cheveley; from whence-from that very library where he first gave, by an act of heroic sincerity, the death-blow to his youthful dreams of happiness-he dated their final renunciation in a few cold lines to his once Emma," inclosing all the letters thus subscribed by a hand, since profaned by coquetry, and about to ratify its own eternal degradation. This done, he returned with a saddened, yet relieved heart, to Lausanne; and, after watching for another year the gentle and almost simultaneous extinction of his brother's malady and life he landed with his remains in England, about the very period which made Emma Grosvenor twenty one. ❝ own It was on the day when-with a bridegroom whom a year of wedded life had sufficed already to unmaskthe heiress went down to take possession of estates, of which she already found herself a mere burdensome appendage, that the long funeral train bound for Cheveley, crossed, by a strange coincidence, the bridal pageant from Grosvenor Hall. The bridegroom bit his lips, the bride sunk back in the carriage. What she felt through a few short years of wedded martyrdom, few can tell, but she died young; and amidst the horrors of a decline, which opium was said to have soothed but to accelerate-held sad and disjointed converse with the absent, but never forgotten, Frank Lygon! SONNET. MILTON VISITING GALILEO IN PRISON. ART thou the mighty reader of the skies, That heaven's eternal hollow could not hold? Look up, look up, great Prophet, and rejoice,- Possessed an ampler state; not Sovran Jove |