“At length, after an absence of four years, I placed the dear girl under the protection of my mother. I was an only child, and she received Anne as the gift of God, a new object of attachment.
“But why dwell upon these things? Why tell how the child ripened into womanhood—beautiful, most beautiful, not in feature merely, though even there few of her sex were her equals; but beautiful in thought, in voice, and motion—that combination of parts, that wondrous result of grace, even where shades may be defective yet producing an harmonious whole? Why tell how her confiding, sisterly attachment remained unshaken, while I learned to love her with all the fervor of manhood? I felt it was hopeless, and became an exile from home, that I might not inflict a pang upon her trusting heart. After a long absence, in which time, which had only softened, I fondly trusted had cured me of my passion, I returned to find Anne but more lovely and attaching, and now doubly lost to me. When she pressed her maidenly lips to my cheek, and again called me brother, I rebelled at the term and madly revealed the truth.
“Poor Anne! she recoiled from me trembling and in tears. At length she put her arms about my neck, and with the same gentle accent, the same confiding tenderness that I remembered upon that fearful night at sea, she uttered—
“ ‘Dear, dear brother Charles, am I not your sister? You do love me, you will not cast me from you, though—though I have dared to love another.’
“I raised her head, and her calm eyes met mine, though her cheek and bosom were dyed with blushes.
“ ‘Never, dear Anne, you shall be my sister; God help me to regard you as such only.’
“I kept my promise. Oh, God! did I not, through years of agony that tongue might never utter!
“Anne became the wife of another, and never, never, can I enough admire her refined womanly deportment. Her whole soul, with all its unutterable wealth of loving, was now his; and yet in my presence all was chastened to a tranquil content, as if she, truthful as she was, dreaded I should know her deep fount of feeling, lest it might enhance my own sense of solitude. ‘Most excellent wretch,’ Othello would have said; every where I traced the evidences of her benevolence, and every where was she mindful of my happiness.
“Holy and generous woman! the earnest, the true-hearted—earth was no place for thee. Enough, she died—died ere a shadow had fallen upon her bright nature—ere the thought had assumed shape that the creature of her idolatry had brought a desecrated gift to the altar.”