"Ah! Gabriella, let bygones be bygones. I was very harsh, very disagreeable then. I wonder you have ever forgiven me; I have never forgiven myself. I know not how it is, but it seems to me that a softening change has come over me. I feel more tenderly towards the young beings committed to my care, more indulgence for the weaknesses and errors of my kind. I did not mind, then, trampling on a flower, if it sprung up in my path; now I would stoop down and inhale its fragrance, and bless my Maker for shedding beauty and sweetness to gladden my way. The perception of the beautiful grows and strengthens in me. The love of nature, a new-born flower, blooms in my heart, and diffuses a sweet balminess unknown before. Even poetry, my child—do not laugh at me—has begun to unfold its mystic beauties to my imagination. I was reading the other evening that charming paraphrase of the nineteenth Psalm: 'The spacious firmament on high,' and I was exceedingly struck with its melodious rhythm; and when I looked up afterwards to the starry heavens, to the moon walking in her brightness, to the blue and boundless ether, they seemed to bend over me in love, to come nearer than they had ever done before. I could hear the whisper of that divine voice, which is heard in the rustling of the forest trees, the gurgling of the winding stream, and the rush of the mountain cataract; and every day," he added, with solemnity, "I love man more, because God has made him my brother."
He paused, and his countenance glowed with the fervor of his feelings. With an involuntary expression of reverence and tenderness, I held out my hand and exclaimed,—
"My dear master—"
"You forgive me, then," taking my hand in both his, and burying it in his large palms; "you do not think me officious and overbearing?"
"O no, sir, I have nothing to forgive, but much to be grateful for; thank you, I must go, for I have a long walk to take—alone."
With an emphasis on the last word I bade him adieu, ran down the steps, and went on musing so deeply on my singular interview with Mr. Regulus, that I attempted to walk through a tree by the way-side. A merry laugh rang close to my ear, and Richard Clyde sprang over the fence right before me.
"It should have opened and imprisoned you, as a truant dryad," said he. "Of what are you thinking, Gabriella, that you forget the impenetrability of matter, the opacity of bark and the incapability of flesh and blood to cleave asunder the ligneous fibres which oppose it, as the sonorous Johnson would have observed on a similar occasion."
"I was thinking of you, Richard," I answered with resolute frankness.
"Of me!" he exclaimed, while his eyes sparkled with animated pleasure. "Oh, walk through all the trees of Grandison Place, if you will honor me with one passing thought."
"You know you have always been like a brother to me, Richard."