It was after midnight when he retired to rest, resolving to be faithful to his affianced bride, and sank to sleep, dreaming of the beautiful Eastern houri.
Eudora occupied a small, plainly-furnished room adjoining her cousin Agatha’s spacious and sumptuous chamber, and, since Agatha had been ailing, it was a part of Eudora’s duty, whenever the invalid was restless at night, to sit by her bedside and read her to sleep. But on reaching her little room this evening, Eudora found the door communicating with her cousin’s chamber closed and locked on the other side.
“She wishes to be alone to-night,” said the gentle girl to herself, as she drew a low chair and sat down before the little coal fire to fall into one of those reveries to which her poetical temperament inclined her. She thought of the magnificent new relative to whom she had been presented that evening, for magnificent, indeed, to her he seemed in his noble, manly beauty and grace. She dwelt upon his image with a strange feeling of satisfaction and content, as upon some good long wanting in her life, and now found and appropriated. She felt again the earnest pressure of his hand in clasping hers; she saw again his eagle eyes melt into tenderness as they met her own; she heard again the earnest tones of his voice in greeting her. No one had ever before clasped her hand, or looked in her eyes, or spoken to her heart as he did. Every one was kind to the orphan; indeed it would have been impossible for any one to have been otherwise to so gentle a creature, but it was with a superficial kindness that did not seem to recognize her deeper need of sympathy. No one had seemed to remember that the stranger girl had under her black bodice a sensitive heart, to be wounded by neglect or delighted by affection—no one but him; and he, too, so handsome, so accomplished, and so distinguished, that he might have been excused for slighting her. At least, so thought Eudora.
“But the gods are ever compassionate, and he is like a god,” said the hero-worshipping young heart to itself. It was so sweet to recall and live over again that meeting in which he had been so earnestly kind.
“He will understand and love me, I feel that he will!” she murmured to herself, with a delighted smile. But the words had no sooner been breathed from her lips than she understood their full import. It stood revealed to her conscience as by a flash of spiritual light, that her imagination was occupied by a forbidden and perilous vision. And yet it was so sweet to entertain this alluring vision, and so bitter to banish it away.
She dropped her head upon her breast, and her clasped hands upon her lap, and sat, as it were, with her dark eyes gazing into vacancy after her receding dream.
Some time she sat thus, and then murmured—
“I am lonely and desolate indeed. None love me truly and deeply, as I need to be loved, as I long to love. They give me food and clothing and kind words, and with these I ought to be content, but I am not! I am not! My heart is starving for a deeper sympathy and a closer friendship, and I long for that as the famishing beggar longs for bread, but I must not hope to satisfy this hunger of the heart upon forbidden fruit, and a sure instinct warns me that even the kindred affection of my cousin is forbidden fruit to me. I will think no more of him.” And with this wise resolution Eudora offered up her evening prayers and retired to rest. But in the world of sleep the forbidden vision followed her, and her cousin Malcolm was ever by her side with looks of sympathy and words of love.
CHAPTER III.
THE BRIDE OF HEAVEN.
I will not think of him—I’ll pace