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36 returned under the pretence of an old debt, by the hand of the Hamburgh trading messenger to young Mr. Frank Melchior. He received the packet as a very especial blessing on the part of Providence, and offered up a prayer that all the debtors of his father’s house might be induced to discharge their debts with as much punctuality as the honest unknown. The truth never glanced across his mind; for the gossiping old body was careful not to betray her own treachery; merely informing him that Madam Brigitta had wholly discontinued the lint trade. His more faithful mirror, however, shortly told him that a great change had occurred in the opposite dwelling, in the course of a single night. The flower-pots had vanished, and the blinds were drawn down even closer than before. His Mela was rarely to be seen, and when she did appear, like the lovely moon, gleaming through a mass of dark clouds on the benighted traveller, her eyes were downcast, she looked as if she had been weeping, and he fancied he saw her wipe a tear away. The sight of her filled his heart with sorrow: he took his lute, and in soft Lydian measures expressed the language of his grief. Then he tried to discover the source of her anxiety, but here he was quite at a loss. Not many days afterwards he remarked that his looking-glass was useless: it no longer reflected the form of his beloved. On examining more minutely into the cause, he found that the curtains had been removed;