CHAPTER LI.
“Precious is the return of that lost look
Of love.”
… “Lighten’d glows each breast with rapture,
Grateful now, too intense before!”
Fitz-Ullin, at length released, sought our heroine from room to room. That unreserved communication of sentiment with her which had been looked forward to with such intoxicating delight, was now anticipated with a sobered feeling: it was now longed for as a balm to heal a sickened, and if, in his circumstances, that were possible, an almost saddened spirit.
Julia was not to be found in the house; he therefore wandered into the shrubbery, where, at the very paling gate at which they had parted on such miserable terms the evening before, he perceived her, and Frances with her. The latter, however, with a sportive air, disappeared at sight of our hero, who, the next moment, stood before Julia. Scarcely had one smile beamed on him, ere all that had almost forced the blissful explanation of the morning from its first place in his mind, was forgotten. This same smile, to Fitz-Ullin, who for so long had not had even a smile, seemed all sufficient; for the lovers now walked on in silence. By the time, however, that they had completed the round of the wood-walk, as it is called, and re-entered the shrubbery at the further end, they appeared not only to have recovered the use of speech, but to have become quite confidential, for they now held between them an open letter, which they seemed to be reading together. From an observation which our hero made as they finished the perusal of the letter, it was probably the one which he had in the morning promised to show Julia, and which had cost both so much misery.
“That letter,” he said, “I cannot view without shuddering. It has so long governed my fate, that I shall never learn to consider it what it really is, a mere unimportant scrap of paper, blotted and rendered foul by falsehood!” Every hour of their past lives was now reviewed; every word, every look, adverted to; and one little spellword found, which, now that it might be spoken, reconciled every contradiction, and solved every mystery. The light, in short, of First Love, that brightest sunshine of the heart, was now flung back on the long perspective of years gone by, shedding its beams on the distant scene, and displaying, decked in their natural and pleasing colours, all those greenest spots on memory’s waste, which hopelessness had hitherto overshadowed, or treachery presented through its own false medium.