“But, after all, Mr. Leslie is kind, handsome, excellent, very wealthy they say, and of a good family. You are very difficult, Stella.”
“Yes, perhaps so,” replied she with agitation and a kind of impatience. Then she continued in a melancholy tone of anguish:
“Ginevra, never speak to me again, I beg, either of happiness or the future. I do not know as I shall ever be any happier than I am now, but I know I can be less so.... Oh! may what I now possess never be taken away from me. I ask nothing more.”
She shuddered and stopped speaking, as if she could not give utterance to her fears. It was not the first time I had seen her seized with a kind of terror when the words future and happiness were mentioned before her. One would have said she thought there was no happiness in reserve for her, unless at the price of that she already possessed, and this thought came over her like a vision of terror.
Poor Stella! Alas! how insecure the joys of earth! To be deprived of them, or tremble lest we may be—that is to say, to possess these joys with a poignant fear that empoisons every instant of their duration, and increases more and more in proportion to their prolongation!...
Is it, then, really necessary for a supernatural light to open our eyes to force us to acknowledge that this world is only a place of promise, of which the realization is in another?
To Be Continued.
The Brooklet.
From The German Of Goethe.