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Rh him a tenderness she could not bestow on her own child. But this state was too intolerable to endure: I loved her even more desperately than ever,—was it still to be without recompense?

"It will readily be supposed, that Carrara and myself could scarcely spend night after night together, and not speak of our mutual circumstances. 'I have been most unfortunate,' said he, one winter evening, when we had drawn close to the pine-boughs, whose flickering light illuminated his worn and pallid face at intervals: 'I have ever limited my desires, yet, even into that narrow limit, disappointment has entered,—I have lived in humble and quiet loneliness, and still misfortune has come from afar to seek me! My son—so gifted—so heroic, such were the creations of our old chivalric poets—dies in his first battle, and leaves me encumbered with his orphan boy, whose only heritage is his father's resemblance. And now, Beatrice—my bright, beautiful Beatrice—haunts the house like a ghost—pale, spiritless, and dejected; with eyes that turn only to the past! And you, even you—so kind in your endurance—will go too; your fortunes will lead you away, and I shall be left alone in my old age, or left with those two children,—too old for their love, yet bound to them by ties I cannot break. I see it before me,