she had undertaken it. He poured his questions with a volubility, which barely left momentary intervals of reply, intermixing them with sarcastic insinuations, which were followed up by the unsparing language of reproach and denouncement. Gratuitously he charged her with infidelity, asserting, forsooth! that the virtue of no female is impregnable; that it was impossible for the chastest of her sex to be a solitary cabin passenger on board a French ship, and yet be proof against the base advances, which its commander would be likely to offer, (a presumption which his own libertinism naturally suggested;) -at any rate, he affirmed that the suspicions he drew from the circumstances of her coming were such, that his distrust of her purity and fidelity could never be removed.

It was in vain that the poor girl essayed to remind Montfort of the comparatively lone and unprovided condition wherein he had left her at H-; his long absence and unbroken silence; and, withal, the expectations he had encouraged, and the confidence she had been taught to repose in him. Vain it equally was that she urged the sincerity of her wish,—on her resolving finally upon the step she had taken to seek him, to procure a suitable companion for her voyage, if for no other purpose than the solace and pleasure of such society; that this comfort, he must be aware, her slender finances would not permit;-that she had mustered her little all to defray the necessary charges of her own passage, and that the proof she gave of her inextinguished affection in encountering the inconveniences and perils of so tedious a travel across an ocean to rejoin him, was surely evidence enough that no additional panoply was needed for her virtue.

Still Montfort urged his taunts and his surmises,—and “Part,” exclaimed he, "forever we must!"

It was not in Isabel's heart to recriminate; yet firmly but mildly she spoke :

"Your words and your conduct, Montfort, betray assuredly an inconsistency. For fifteen long months you have left me almost unprotected at H-; and you intimate, nevertheless, no suspicion that I have been guilty of improprieties there. Now, when I have given you the highest proofs of love and confidence and devotedness in my power to display, and when my weeping eyes and bursting heart bespeak my overwhelming anguish for your altered demeanor, your injurious mistrusts and your unfeeling reception of me within these doors, which I had fondly relied to call mutually ours;-under such circumstances it is that you command me from your side, and forbid me to see, to think of you more! O Montfort! Can it indeed be so? Has Isabel lived to experience the wretchedness of this hour? Is she still longer to drink, and to the very dregs, the cup of bitterness? Do you,-dearest, as you still are to your Isabel's heart,-do you drive her from your presence forever ?"

The appeal was ineffectual. Montfort, unmoved, reiterated his opprobrious charges.

"I take heaven to witness!" said Isabel. "Nay, I protest," she solemnly added," I swear to you, Montfort, by all that is holy,-your suspicions of me are most injuriously false !"

Could the warmth, the glowing fervency of such asseverations be resisted? They were resisted. Isabel was ordered instantly to withdraw!

Overwhelmed with grief and amazement, bereft of every support but the consciousness of innocence, she knew neither what to do, nor whither to betake herself. It is not wonderful that the whole which transpired seemed to her the terrible incoherence of a dream. Yet, burning though her brain was, and all but completely frenzied, the brutal voice, ("can it be," she asked herself "the voice of Montfort?") which thundered in her hearing, "Begone!" aroused her to momentary consciousness. She strengthened herself, and-dishonored, repulsed, and spurned-she prepared to leave that house, which a little before she had entered in the raptured belief that therein at length she was to find an asylum and a home.

As Isabel was moving falteringly away, the fierce and impatient Montfort, with still more savage vehemence, bade her haste, and threatened, if otherwise, the summons of a servant to compel and expedite her departure. Then it was that the conviction flashed with full and harrowing keenness through her breast,-that the heart of Montfort was indeed estranged from her-that time and absence had totally alienated his affections,-that, in short, he was no longer hers. Was it the desperation of grief, or the passionate working of a woman's pride, herself of Castilian extraction,-that roused the resolution of prompt obedience? Yes. Farewell!" she impassionately exclaimed-"forever," she may have added, but the tones of her sweet voice could no longer be distinguished from the dying echoes of her hasty steps, already receding from the threshhold!

By the same conveyance, which brought her to O, but which, fortunately, had delayed its departure, Isabel returned to the port where she had debarked. Letters, recommendatory, with which her kind friends at H- had taken care to provide her, introduced her to the knowledge, the ready hospitalities, and sympathizing tenderness of several families in that place. The story of her wrongs quickly noised and was circulated. The base conduct of Montfort naturally excited a general and lively throb of indignation. M. Hilaire, whose appearance, behavior, and credentials, left no room to doubt his claims to the nicest honor and highmindedness, warmly resented and repelled the implied aspersions, which had been cast upon him. Some very respectable merchants interfered and endeavored to mediate between the several parties. Conspicuous in these disinterested efforts was the Consul of his Most Christian Majesty. He sought, but unavailingly, to influence Montfort to a sense of duty; to soften his headlong passions; to unmask the delusions to which he had surrendered himself, and the manifest injustice of his procedures. Montfort would listen to no terms predicated on the resumption of his former, though sacredly plighted, relations to the innocent lady he had so shamelessly renounced. As the latter could not, with propriety, remain among those, on whose courtesies she was thus unexpectedly thrown, but would be compelled to return shortly to H-, to seek thence a passage for herself and the equally friendless Annette, to the home of their birth, it was next proposed to Montfort that he should furnish the funds,-a reasonable amount being named,-to meet these indispensable outfits. But no; "he would supply no such sum;"-" he would disburse not one shilling, even to liquidate the expenditures authorized and in

curred on his account at H-; no, not he!" and thus did he crown his remorselessness and perfidy.

The benevolent persons, who had already so feelingly and actively interested themselves in behalf of the fair and cruelly-wronged stranger, then generously raised a sufficiency, the acceptance of which they pressed with all the delicacy, which the exigency would admit, to aid the return of Isabel; and, after a few weeks of painful mental suffering, she embarked once more in the Loire,-again under the care of M. Hilaire, on the homebound voyage to H—.

It was not long subsequently to these events, that Capt. Ashton happened to arrive at the port,-well known in the commercial world,where they took place. The particulars he gathered from the narratives of many, the subject being in almost every one's mouth. Combined with his knowledge both of the respective characters and mutual previous ties of Isabel and Montfort, the recital which he learnt of the circumstances following, and the issue to which they led, made a deep and indelible impression on his mind. Montfort at that time had himself departed from the Brazils, probably divining that his further stay, in a neighborhood were he was marked with such merited reprobation, would be little conducive to his comfort. Whither he had gone, was not, however, understood. A rumor, Capt. Ashton elsewhere heard, that Montfort came to an untimely end,-a victim to his irregularities and vices. This impression may have been premature. Humanity hopes it, and would fain console herself with the trust, that a forbearing providence spared him to penitential and curative remorse; and that his mind was ultimately led, though by the waters of bitterness, to the attainment of that peace, which pardon whispered from above can alone infuse into the troubled conscience. The only palliation, which can be offered for his conduct in the transactions we have reviewed, is, that his mind had become in some sense stultified, and each better feeling and impulse worn and blunted by habitual excesses, and particularly by that of daily inebriation.

We turn with sadness from the dark portraiture of a character so sullied and defaced.

Star of a parent's radiant hope! how art thou fallen! Alas, in the morning of thine ascension, sunk and quenched in the abyss of groveling sensuality!

Fancy reverts to the fair form of that beauteous spirit, which so lately receded from its eye. Born with charms and endowments, which, as they ripened and expanded, were fitted to grace any circle, and with a soul as much superior to that of the degraded Montfort as a seraph's purity transcends the foulness of a nature depraved, is she lost to her appropriate sphere? The sequel of her adventures could not be learned from the benevolent friend and informant who furnished the particulars already communicated. But imagination seeks to supply the deficiency.

It anxiously follows in thought the injured Isabel during the dreariness of her homeward voyage. But who can picture the feelings, which agitated her bosom, as she reflected upon the light she might be viewed in, on her return to H-, and the possible constructions that would arise unfavorable to her character,-notwithstanding its spotlessness,

through the treatment of Montfort? How must her heart have been stung, when, especially, the image of the paternal home would rush across her mind, and when the thought would occur, with what unmerited humiliation to that home it remained for her to repair-from which, not two years before, she had removed, a happy, affianced maiden? Could we allow the utmost to the weakness of feminine principle, could we admit for a moment the supposition as barely possible, that this young creature, of a heart so warm and of charms so attractive, all which, in the eye of one, for whom alone she had accounted them of value, had been contemned and scorned;-could we believe such a being capable of fall, and of suffering the united principle both of innate modesty and of duty no longer to support her;-could we moreover think, however decorous and honorable he had been on the previous voyage, that the commander of the ship, which bore her away from the New World, and the sight of him, her presumed relationship to whom had before been sufficient protection,-should now have taken advantage of her desolate situation, and, with sympathy ripened into a wicked passion, have breathed unhallowed love into her soul;-could we, it is still urged, conjecture all this, on whose head mainly would the guilt of her frailty descend? Still more, if next in despair of regaining peace and happiness, unwilling to confront in her humbled state the scrutiny of parents and kindred and the companions of her unstained youth, looking also upon herself as already a destined outcast, she should commence, subsequently to her return to H-, a career of vice and infamy and wo,-ah, wretched Montfort! how awful the accumulation of wickedness entailed upon thee! not more for the sorrows, than the sins, of her, whose happiness thou hadst blasted, and whose virtue thou wert the cause of betraying!

But from such a contemplation of the mere possible fortunes of the unhappy Isabel, the heart instinctively recoils. In the absence of all knowledge of their occurrence, it would be cruelly injurious to indulge the supposition. Her previous pure and exemplary demeanor is a satisfactory guarantee for the continued, the sustained excellence of her principles and character. With a soul unsullied by crime, pure as the descending snow-flake, nay, adorned with brighter virtues from the very trials and conflicts she had triumphantly endured, it is gladsome to anticipate that at length she attained a merited and tranquil lot; that never was she deserted, nor left unstrengthened by a heavenly power; that" angels and ministers of grace defended her," and that, safe in their protection, she ultimately found the asylum of a beloved home. Perhaps that comfort awaited her at H-. Perhaps it was reserved for her in her ancestral isles. In the latter event, indeed, it may be, that, heart-broken with the wrongs and the griefs she had endured, and taught the perfidy of one man, from whose example she might hastily infer the probable insincerity and treachery of all, she may have sought the retreat of a convent,-there to forget in the consolations of religion, especially in meditating on the joys, no less durable than bright, of a purer world, the bitter disappointments she had tasted ere the noon of the present life.

Farewell, then, injured Fair One! Accept the sympathy of a heart, which has bled at the recital of thy sorrows; and refuse not its aspiration that a celestial balm may effectually soothe thy wounded affections,

and that peace may revisit thy bosom,-the peace with which a stranger can never intermeddle, and which neither the world, nor the base ones of the world, can give or take away.

If the writer of the foregoing narrative has succeeded in communicating to its readers a portion of that sympathy which he himself felt on learning the chequered events of the early life of Isabel, they may naturally be solicitous to know what subsequently befel her. When the sketch he has given was prepared, he was no less ignorant of further particulars, than those to whose attention it is offered. Accident, at a later period, brought to light some additional facts, which are annexed to complete the tale.

Time rolled onward-a considerable period having intervened,when a tourist in France, in traveling through one of its beautiful communes, was forcibly struck by its picturesque scenery, and induced to rest there for a few days. Of the acquaintance, which he formed in its sweet neighborhood, was that of the family of M. St. Albyn. It happened, on one occasion, among the topics of social converse, that some anecdotes were given of several gentry in the vicinage. In the relation of these, mention was made of the name of M. Hiliare. It stimulated the curiosity of the traveler, and, on inquiry, it was ascertained that it was the self-same person, who had sailed master of the Loire. St. Albyn recited the particulars which follow.

The Loire safely accomplished its homeward voyage from the Brazils. Isabel was restored to the tranquil abode of that benevolent woman, who had been to herself and Annette, during each step of their trials, both protectress and mother. The once radiant features of Isabel wore a shade of deep melancholy. Her light form evinced the wastes, not only of harassing fatigues, but of her combined disappointments and sorrows. Happily there was a calm in her sadness, which indicated that reflection on the ill desert of her misfortunes, and the rectitude of her heart, together with a conviction of the worthlessness of the object of her late affections, had already operated favorably for her peace; and, united to the influence of time and the soothing offices of friends, the promise was given that the light of comfort would once more be shed in her stricken bosom.

The conduct of M. Hilaire had justified the trust reposed in him. Sympathy for Isabel, and unaffected admiration of her charms, could hardly fail to inspire him with tenderer emotions, when she was released from her previous engagements. But his homage was of a respectful nature, and he waited for a suitable opportunity and better titles, in order to declare himself. His family was respectable. By his enterprise, he had already amassed a moderate property, and, shortly after his return from the Brazils, the death of a near and wealthy relative, put him in possession of a competency. He retired from the "Loire," the name of which he was wont in after time to say 66 was music to his ear;" and took a neat and tasteful tenement romantically situated in the commune of

The delicate state of Isabel's health, and the depression of spirits still left from the trials and scenes she had passed through, rendering her unfit to undertake as yet a voyage to her native isles, her assistance