of the obligations she had conferred upon him. We accordingly repaired to his apartment, which some friendly hand had decorated with the last flowers of the season, to refresh, by their fragrance, the languid senses of the drooping invalid, who received us with the most touching and graceful expressions of gratitude, for the kindness which he said" had been so profusely lavished upon him." More he would have added on the subject, but Lady G., whose goodness blushes at its own praise, eagerly sought to evade a theme which was painful to the delicacy of her feelings, and adroitly turned the conversation to the pleasure she felt at seeing him so much recovered.

"If existence," said Delamere, with a half-suppressed sigh, "be termed a blessing, I am, in a great measure, indebted to your Ladyship for its prolongation.Why then would you shun those thanks which are so justly your due ?"

"I hope," replied Lady G., without

noticing the latter part of this sentence, "that many years of happiness will convince you of the reality of the blessing you seem disposed to doubt."

Delamere sighed, and was silent.

Come, come, my young friend," resumed Lady G., "I see your late illness has affected your spirits, and must no longer leave you to the indulgence of these melancholy musings. Till you are able to join our family circle, Alicia and myself will use our best efforts to enliven your solitude. My powers of amusement, she added, with an involuntary sigh, are almost exhausted; but Alicia will, I am sure, endeavour to supply the deficiency."

Delamere bowed his sense of her proffered kindness, but the smile that played round his colourless lip seemed by its sadness to mock the complacence it was intended to express:

Too delicate ever to pry unnecessarily into the affairs of others, Lady G.

carefully avoided any allusion that could be construed by Delamere into a wish to be acquainted with the particulars of his present situation; but, as if divining the motive of this reserve, he introduced the subject himself by acquainting her with his name and country, which we had already heard from my hostess of the Black Lion. He added, "that, possessed of an independent fortune, and master of his own actions, he passed a great portion of his time in travelling, and had already visited various parts of Europe, before the attraction of its romantic scenery, and pastoral simplicity of manners, had induced him to direct his course to Switzerland.— His habits, he continued, (glancing towards me,) were rather eccentric; and the excessive fatigues to which he had often exposed himself, in his various excursions to explore the solitary and almost inaccessible beauties of the country, had, he believed, in some measure, occasioned his late disorder. His declara

tion of a speedy departure from Geneva was interrupted by Lady G., who said, with some degree of sportiveness, "That as she had now, like an enchantress of old, succeeded in carrying off the wandering knight to her fairy palace, he must not expect a speedy emancipation."

Delamere attempted to answer her in the same style of badinage, but his spirits were not equal to the effort; and, fearful that conversation might be too fatiguing to him in his present debilitated state, we soon afterwards left him to s solitary meditations.

By slow degrees the health of the English stranger repaid, in its amendment, the cares we had sustained; but he still continued extremely weak, and as an increased intimacy afforded me every day additional opportunity of observing the gradual unfoldings ofhis character and disposition, I perceived that the workings of "the mind diseased," had no inconsiderable share in promoting the continuance

of that corporeal debility from which he suffered. Never, however, did a complaint escape his lips, and it was only from his feeble step and languid countenance that we could discern the excessive weakness which oppressed him. It did not, indeed, require a long intimacy with Delamere to discover that his mind was of no common cast. Endowed with an intellect of the first order, highly cultivated and informed, yet tenacious of discovering to others the information he possessed-reserved in manner, and taciturn in speech, he would yet at times equally astonish and delight us by the force of his language, and the brilliancy and originality of his ideas, and frequently displayed on subjects which interested him, a warmth and intensity of feeling which forcibly contrasted with his generally cold and distant de

meanor.

All these different observations led me to expect in Delamere an uncommon su