thought every moment lost till she was in the Park.

The first object that she saw there was Mr. Willoughby. He rode directly up to her carriage, inquired kindly after her health, and after having received a satisfactory answer, confirmed by the sparkling eye, and glowing cheeks of Isabella, he began gaily to talk to her of her achievements the evening before-told her of the conquests she had made, bade her beware that she did not get his throat cut, and after laughing and chatting by the chariot window for about three minutes, rode on, and left her to prosecute her drive.

Isabella was in Heaven! she felt herself already in possession of all that Mrs. Nesbitt had promised her, and could not but accede to that lady's vehement asseverations that all she had foretold had come true, and that if she

would but continue to go on as she had begun, that she could not fail to beat Lady Charlotte and every other competitor from the field.

Isabella was this day engaged to dinner, where she met with a large and brilliant party, all emulous to compliment her on the pleasure that she had afforded them the evening before; and eager to stimulate her, by the most exaggerated estimation of it, to repeat the expensive gratification. Lady Charlotte was present; she appeared to be annihilated; and, added to the usual gay good humour with which Mr. Willoughby was accustomed to treat Isabella, she fancied that she saw something of an air of gallantry in his address to her, which told her that the admiration which she had excited in others had not been lost upon him.

The evening was closed by other scenes equally gratifying to her self

love, and to the holy triumph, as she thought it, over Lady Charlotte.

Isabella returned home intoxicated with her success. She called it happiness; she called it the gratification of conjugal love. Alas! she knew not that it was composed of vanity, of pride, of strife, of envy, and of hate!

Poor human nature! to what dangers art thou exposed, even in thy pursuits after the most worthy objects!

CHAP. XII.

"Ranks as a virtue, and is still a vice."

COWPER.

THE present effervescence of Isabella's mind stirred up the latent love of pleasure which nature had implanted, and which education had nourished; but which, in the first days of her marriage, had been smothered by the more exquisite delight which she derived from being the sole and exclusive object of Mr. Willoughby's thoughts and affections, and which,

on her return to more general society, had been depressed by the fear that she had lost, or was losing, this, to her the first distinction of life. But now, when she could persuade herself to regard it as the means of securing the inestimable prize of a husband's love, it awoke with fresh vigour, and was but the more predominant for its late subjection. If education had left one impression deeper than another upon the mind of Isabella, it was, that amusement was the great business of life. It is true that it had been qualified by the undefined, and perhaps undefinable epithet, "innocent." But pleasure, in some form, had been held out to her as the sum of all human happiness. It had been the bribe that had made smooth the first rudiments of knowledge; it had been the reward of her progress in all that she had been taught; it was to be her indem