CHAPTER IX.
If Satan had never fallen,
Hell had been made for thee.
The Revenge.
Ah! poor, unsuspecting innocence! and is that
fair flower about to perish in the blasts of dereliction
and unkindness? Demon indeed must
be he who could gaze on those mildly-beaming eyes, on
that perfect form, the emblem of sensibility, and yet
plunge the spotless mind of which it was an index, into
a sea of repentance and unavailing sorrow. I should
scarce suppose even a demon would act so, were
there not many with hearts more depraved even than
those of fiends, who first have torn some unsophisticated
soul from the pinnacle of excellence, on which it
sat smiling, and then triumphed in their hellish victory
when it writhed in agonized remorse, and strove
to hide its unavailing regret in the dust from which the
fabric of her virtues had arisen. "Ah! I fear me, the
unsuspecting girl will go;" she knows not the malice
and the wiles of perjured man—and she is gone!
It was late in the evening, and Eloise had returned from her mother's funeral, sad and melancholy; yet, even amidst the oppression of grief, surprise, and astonishment, pleasure and thankfulness, that any one should notice her, possessed her mind as she read over and over the characters traced on the note which she still held in her hand. The hour was late, the moon was down, yet countless stars bedecked the almost boundless hemisphere. The mild beams of Hesper slept on the glassy surface of the lake, as, scarcely agitated by the zephyr of evening, its waves rolled in slow succession; the solemn umbrage of the pine-trees, mingled with the poplar, threw their undefined shadows on the water; and the nightingale, sitting solitary in the haw-
