I watched her closely during the performance,—indeed, I had no power to withdraw my gaze from her; and once or twice her eyes met mine, and I thought I could perceive she was not altogether displeased at my attention. Her confusion betrayed that to me, and in one short hour I was a lost man.

When the play was over, I framed a miserable excuse, which I thought at the time a most ingenious one, to my friend for not accompanying him home to supper, as I had promised; and hastening after my unknown and her mother, who had left the box, was just in time to see them enter a coach. I contrived to keep pace with it, and saw it deposit its beautiful freight at a house in a small private street near Portman Square.

I could laugh—unaccustomed as I am even to private laughing now-a-days—when I think, as I do sometimes, on those days of sentiment. It were as futile to attempt to renew that sentiment after thirty, as to strive to recal those days, and to bid them stand in next year's calendar. The green wood is out of the tree by that time; and the trunk becomes hard, and gnarled, and stubborn. Now is the time to enjoy life. At five-and-thirty the blood and the brain act in concert, and the heart beats not one pulse the quicker, while they do their spiriting—not gently always.—To return.

I went home that night altogether an altered man, and rose next morning from a sleepless bed, absorbed with the one idea which had worked so miraculous a change within me. All that day, almost without intermission, did I pace up and down the street in the hope of seeing her; but in vain. Not once did she approach the window; and I did not deem it prudent to question one of the servants who came out of the house several times during the day. I betook myself, therefore, towards evening to a green-grocer's shop in the neighbourhood; and the purchase of some fruit gave me a privilege to indulge in a little chat with the good old woman who conducted the business. I affected to be chiefly solicitous respecting the elderly lady, whom I had seen by chance, and believed to be a friend of my father, but whose name I could not, for the life of me, remember. The old woman smiled at my shallow artifice, but proceeded to inform me that the elderly lady was the widow of an officer who had been killed in the Peninsular War, leaving an only daughter, at that period an infant. I begged pardon—the name? did she know the daughter's name?

"Oh yes! it was Isabella Denham."

It was an era in my life, the first sound of that name. I thanked my kind informant, and withdrew.

I need not tell how unremittingly, and for how many weeks, I paced up and down that street, with various success; how regularly I attended the church she frequented; and how at length I obtained an introduction to the family.

I found Isabella Denham more captivating than the accumulated fancies and self-willed convictions of months had pictured her to me. It is no unusual result in such cases; but whether it be that the object transcends the imagination, or that the imagination subserves the object, I know not. It was so, however; for feeling upon these occasions takes the place of reason, which is an impertinence.

Let me be just. I think, had I loved Isabella Denham less, I should equally have admired her. She had a mind and a heart; she was accomplished; she was beautiful, gentle, and good; and she loved me. Yes, she loved me. I believed it then, and I am certain of it now. How I loved her, she never knew: that was for Time to show, and he has shown it.

I offered her my hand in due time, and was accepted. How I despised the sneers and banter of some of my friends who could not conceive the idea of a marriage with fortune on one side, and none on the other, and yet were endeavouring at the same time to effect an engagement of a similar nature in their own favour! How I disregarded the gratuitous advice of sundry of my officious relatives, who thought that all love had died when their own gave up the ghost, and who sometimes prophesied truly because they were always prognosticating evil!