a feeling naturally so sensitive in youth, but seldom existing so powerfully as with Rosilia, still closed her lips and enforced her silence.
It was in vain to persuade herself otherwise; Douglas reigned the idol of her imagination, the invariable associate of her secret thoughts. Ah! why, she would sometimes mentally ejaculate, did I not seek for his reformation? Perhaps his errors might not have taken deep root in his life, but might have sprung from the mere casualties of existing circumstances. Her refusal of him upon such grounds caused her also an apprehension that she might have become responsible for, or rather instrumental to, his future irregularities of conduct; that she ought to have made use of her ascendancy over his affections, to have reclaimed him from the past, was an idea which often sustained and aggravated her affliction; but the most ardent of her feelings was the desire to communicate the sentiments that absorbed her, the only attachment she supposed herself ever likely to feel, to the only object ever likely to call it forth. Yet it was most probable, that had such an occasion offered, she would still have shrunk from the disclosure.
Such was the unhappy result ensuing from the usual even tenor of her life. The silence of retirement, operating upon the sensibilities of her heart,
