Page:Glenarvon (Volume 1).djvu/298

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in life to the person thus attached,—all this was past.

Such love is not depravity. To have felt it, and to feel it no more, is like being deprived of the light of the sun, and seeing the same scenes, which we once viewed brilliant beneath its beams, dark, clouded and cheerless.—Calantha had given up her heart too entirely to its power, ever more to endure existence without it. Her home was a desert; her thoughts were heavy and dull; her spirits and her health were gone; and even the desire of pleasing, so natural to the vain, had ceased. Whom was she to wish to please, since Avondale was indifferent? or what to her was the same, absent and preoccupied.

Such depression continued during the gloomy wintry months; but with the first warm breeze of spring, they left her; and in the month of May, she prepared to join the splendid party which was ex-