Page:Duty and Inclination 2.pdf/204

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202
DUTY AND INCLINATION.

quiet, was indispensable towards the amendment of his patient.

Alas! he little thought how useless was such a precaution; for, though all was still without, had he the power of allaying those violent commotions within—those perturbations of the heart, wanderings of imagination, and deep workings of thought, totally baffling his endeavours, as beyond the powers of his art to calm?

The chill succeeding to intervals of burning heat, soon announced that Douglas was seized by a fever of the most acute kind, a disease always attended by extreme danger:

"Where now, ye lying vanities of life,
Ye ever tempting, ever cheating train,
Where are ye now? And what is your amount?
Vexation, disappointment, and remorse!"

But who is she, who with looks of tender anxiety, bends sometimes over that couch of sickness; who, upon those visits to the suffering invalid, is accompanied by another, a female friend as charitable as herself; and who shares in her attention to one insensible to all passing around him?

Miss Airey, then about nineteen years of age, had early lost her parents, she was destitute of fortune, and every tie in life, with the exception of that denved from the friendship of Mrs. Melbourne, the