Page:Mildred Pemberton.pdf/7

314 of years, had passed over the head of Mildred, before she rose from that couch of sickness. She left there the rose of her cheek, the light of her eye— Her lip still wore the sweetness of a smile, But not its gaiety." The buoyancy of her step, her sweet singing laugh, were gone for ever,—she had lived past youth and hope. Some one has truly said— 'Tis not the lover which is lost,   The love for which we grieve, It is the price that they have cost,     The memories which they leave." This was the case with Mildred—she despised Arrezi too thoroughly to regret him—she deeply felt how unworthy he was of her deep-devoted affection. Always accustomed to wealth, she did not understand its value; we must want money to really know its worth, and money seemed to her the vilest consideration that could have influence. She thought with astonishment on the duplicity of the Count. Inconstancy she could have forgiven; that would have come within the limits of her poetical experience. She had been capable of any personal sacrifice to secure his happiness, even with a rival; but to be left so unhesitatingly the moment that she had no longer the prospect of wealth, showed too plainly what his object had been from the first—all his enthusiasm, all his romance, had been mere acting. She shrank away from a world in which there was such deceit. To what could she trust whose confidence had been so betrayed? Mildred Pemberton had laid down on the pallet of her secluded cell a girl full of the confidence, the generous impulses, the warm affections of girlhood; she rose from it a grave and thoughtful woman. She had ceased to look forward, she wished for nothing but quiet, she hoped, but only in heaven. All the poetry of her imaginative temperament flung back violently upon herself, served only to strengthen the influence of her new creed. Beloved by all, the earnestness of her devotion made her thought almost a saint by some; and the sweet, strange accents of the English novice, blending in the hymns of the saintly choir, gave a new fervour to religious exaltation. She entered upon the duties of her new state with zeal, and in their performance, and the thousand chains of daily habit, sought forgetfulness of the past. Still it was hard to forget her native tongue, and her native land. Separated from her father, his harshness was forgotten, and she only remembered the ties that united them. She had been in the convent nearly a twelvemonth, and the time for the final vows was rapidly approaching, when one day to her astonishment she heard an English voice in the garden, and saw the fair face of one of her own countrywomen. She soon became acquainted with Emily Pemberton, and found that she was her cousin, though from a family disagreement they had never met. Mildred was mistaken in supposing that she was dead to all sense of affection, for her heart warmed at once to her young relative. It was some time before she found courage to speak of the past, and at last she asked about her father. "He is quite broken by his last illness; pale, emaciated, he is but the shadow of what he was. It is a melancholy thing to see him wander through the dull rooms of the old hall, as if haunted by the memory of those who had once been there."