For one moment she lingered, looking on him silent as himself; the next,
she left the apartment with hasty and uncertain steps.
On reaching the garden, she unconsciously took the path leading to the
bank where she had once loved to play secretly upon her lute and to look
on the distant mountains reposing in the warm atmosphere which summer
evenings shed over their blue expanse. How eloquent was this little
plot of ground of the quiet events now for ever gone by!--of the joys,
the hopes, the happy occupations, which rise with the day that
chronicles them, and pass like that day, never to return the same!--
which the memory alone can preserve as they were, and the heart can
never resume but in a changed form, divested of the presence of the
companion of the incident of the departed moment, which formed the charm
of the past and makes the imperfection of the present.
Tender and thronging were the remembrances which the surrounding
prospect called up, as the sad mistress of the garden looked again on
her little domain! She saw the bank where she could never more sit to
sing with a renewal of the same feelings which had once inspired her
music; she saw the drooping flowers that she could never restore with
the same childlike enjoyment of the task which had animated her in
former hours! Young though she still was, the emotions of the youthful
days that were gone could never be revived as they had once existed! As
waters they had welled up, and as waters they had flowed forth, never to
return to their source! Thoughts of these former years--of the young
warrior who lay cold beneath the heavy earth--of the desponding father
who mourned hopeless in the room above--gathered thick at her heart as
she turned from her flower-beds--not, as in other days, to pour forth
her happiness to the music of her lute, but to search laboriously for
the sustenance of life.
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