"You are young and rash," returned Lewen, still preserving his calm"Your intemperate imagination

ness.

has presented to you a picture of what does not and never will exist. It is not for you to raise the veil of the sanctuary with the temerity of a boy, and to rush presumptuously into the most sacred mysteries of our most holy religion. By what means the Father of all may be pleased to draw lambs to His fold, it becomes not us to inquire or conjecture. If we be His appointed instruments, His spirit will lead us, and we must work out His will, accordingly as He shall appoint. The disciples of those divine men of antiquity of whom you have spoken, admire the spirit of mercy which they breathe, but they forget not the terrible instances of recklessness and cruelty which the annals of the contemporaries of each present. And because, from

1

the erring nature of humanity, many of our brethren may be mistaken in regard to the nature of that service most acceptable to God, we must remember that the seal of the covenant is yet unbroken, that the truths of our religion remain immutable and unchanged. Forget not that they who presumptuously put forth their hands to touch the ark, died !"

The Page remained silent ; his eyes were cast down, and if his countenance beamed not with conviction, its expression of disdain had disappeared.

He wandered to the window. It looked down on a verdant slope of ground, slanting towards a river. The figure of the Lady Blanche Evelyn was seen through the foliage of a grove, that bounded its western extremity.

"My thoughts," said he, turning away laughingly," are like Shirley's management of his horse. He mounts

the animal with some difficulty, reins him in tightly, the creature starts from the direct road galloping on this side and that side, and all Shirley's skill is insufficient to keep him in a right line. Even so it is with me; I came to you with my heart full of the Lady Blanche Evelyn, wishing to speak to you of nought but her, and in truth it seems to me that she has been the very point from which I have continually diverged, of which I have said nothing. We have travelled together to the supernal realms of Heaven, and to the infernal ones of Hell, lingering but little on this planet of ours. in truth, if it contained many beings like the Lady Blanche, we would not wish to quit it! Oh, by our Lady, she is a peerless creature! so wondrous sweet, so tender, so touching, so kind, so lovely alike in her paleness and in her roseate glow of complexion,

Yet,

that one would have imagined young Joy would have been enamoured of her, and have made her his continual home But not so. Sorrow contests his empire there, and, I suspect, more than half divides it. Had you seen her, as I did, with the gay throng to-day, you had thought her the pale, pensive Angel of Pity, just descended from Heaven, whilst the dew and the light of the sky still beamed on her. If she smiled at the remarks of my Lord her father, it was in such a sort, as she would say, my duty bids me show cheerfully, but my heart would very fain indulge its sadness. My eye never left her, and I saw the tears sparkle in hers when none else did; and I saw them gem her long lashes like dew-drops sparkling on a dark leaf by the moon-light. And then she became pale as alabaster; and when my

Lord turned to speak to her, a glow

suffused her cheek under his glance, willing to spare him pain by so lovely and duteous and kind a deception. I like that variableness of complexion in woman; it is the eloquence of the soul, it is a transparent veil of the thoughts through which they show all lovely and pure as they may be, as they must be ; for that transparent veil of alternate blushes and paleness never enveloped aught but purity; it seems to me of such exquisite texture, woven by angels and spread by them over a kindred spirit, that no demon could imitate it in the service of guilt, his workmanship would look clumsy and gross, and be instantly de

tected."

"You are deeply read in the sex," returned Lewen smiling, "and are well qualified to instruct a novice like myself, in all those intricacies, those doub