broken faith, of years elapsed, and of the dark sha- 
doT>r of an early grave 1 or had he beheld all again unmoved ? 
Had time done its work, and eifaced her memory from his 
, as well as from the old garden where I never found one 
lingering trace of her being,  where all vestige of her had 
passed away, like the mark of her light foot-prints from the 
earth ? And then came the thought : ' I, too, am young ; and, 
unless I have been much deceived, well nigh as fair as she onco 
was : and this house, for some time at least, is my home. Must 
my fate be like hers ? Have youth and beauty no better, no hap- 
pier destiny? Is all over with a few brief years ; and when 
the gates of death have closed upon us, are we to be forgotten, 
as she is now 1 Must the spots we most loved, which are filled 
with the glorious and fervent wordnetdesire of our youth, know us no 
more ? and oh ! far sadder thought, shall the  where we 



^ NATHALIE. 331 

had made our inward home,  shall these, too, forget us, or 
remember us merely as the pale, scarcely earthly creations of 
a long-forgotten wordnetdesire ?'