While Amy inwardly murmured, "I shall never fall into the snare."
CHAPTER VII.
MISGIVINGS.
Gay fowlers at a flock of hearts; Woodcocks to shun your snares have skill, You show so plain, you strive to kill. In love the heartless catch the game, And they scarce miss, who never aim." Green.
How often it happens that in realising our fondest hopes, we experience not the happiness we expected.
Each and all of us, at some unhappy period of our lives, have been led to exclaim, "Ah! if this state of uncertainty were but at an end, this suspense over. Let the worst come, we are prepared for it: it cannot make us more miserable than we are." Yet fortified as we deem ourselves against the worst, braced up as it were, and prepared for aught that may happen; how feeble we are, at the very best, when the ruin, sickness, death of those we love, or whatever sorrow it may be, overtakes us; how often—always—unequal to bear the blow. Then we sigh for our former state of uncertainty; it was bliss compared to our present grief, when, fancying ourselves prepared for the worst, gentle hope filled our hearts, and bade us look trustfully onwards for bright smiles, wreathed with roses; where, alas! we found only tears beneath a crown of thorns.
"Such is life; The distant prospect always seems more fair; And when attained, another still succeeds, Far fairer than before,—yet compassed round With the same dangers and the same dismay; And we poor pilgrims in this dreary maze, Still discontented, chase the fairy form Of unsubstantial happiness, to find, When life itself is sinking in the strife, 'Tis but an airy bubble and a cheat."
Thus it was with Amy Neville. She had been uneasy and unhappy at not hearing from her mother; evil forebodings had filled her heart, and all kinds of imaginary fancies her brain. She had sighed again and again but for one short letter of explanation, clearing away her mother's mysterious silence, and lifting the veil that seemed to hang so gloomily and heavily between her and her home.