"Any other female than Constantia Beverning," said Jocelyn, "would have been deterred by the fear of danger, even if she had not been appalled by the paramount dread of infection; and I shudder when I think to what risk your generous courage may have exposed you."

"Yielding to the impulse of the moment," replied Constantia, "no apprehensions entered my mind, nor do they disturb me now, for I am provided with an antidote which effectually preserved me in Holland, although I braved the fury of the distemper by visiting many of my poorer pensioners, when they were suffering from its attack. I am no inexperienced doctress in this complaint, and I undertake to pronounce that you cannot communicate it, for it has already left you. You will recover, but you will still need a nurse, and I am bound to supply that character, since it was I who chased away your former attendant. Indeed you have a double claim upon my services, for it was by my advice that the Alderman closed up his doors;

I thus became the unintentional author of your expulsion from his house."

"Were you, then, aware that I had made арplication for admittance ?" inquired Jocelyn.

"The servant to whom you applied," answered Constantia, blushing, " mentioned your name, adding that he had seen you enter our neighbour's lodging-house."

"Then your astonishment at our meeting was not of course so lively as my own," observed Jocelyn.

"Our servant had seen you again quit the house," said Constantia, fixing her eyes upon the ground," and had not marked your return, so that I had reason to hope you were no longer its inmate. But I must not thus neglect my patient: I have brought you another cordial, whose influence, I trust, will be not less salutary than the last; and two books calculated to afford you consolation and recreation. Body and mind will be thus jointly restored, and at my return this afternoon I hope to find that my patient has

done justice to both my prescriptions. Farewell!" The volume intended for his consolation was the Bible; the other, which was also in folio, was Pharamond, one of those chivalrous romances of Walter de Calprenede, which found peculiar favour in Constantia's eyes, because it sublimised the passion of love into a quintessence of refinement, much better adapted to angelic natures than to those of flesh and blood.

In the statement she had made to Jocelyn there was nothing disengenuous; a noble and proud candour was her distinguishing characteristic; but there was an omission, of which she was perhaps herself unconscious, although it would have helped to explain her opportune appearance in the extremity of his danger. Her averment might be true, that she would have rushed to the assistance of a stranger with equal alacrity, had she heard his cries: but for a stranger she would not have been hovering about the house in which she imagined him to dwell; she would not have haunted the gallery early and

late that conducted to it; she would not have been in a perpetual agitation and alarm, from the first moment that she had observed his abode to be marked by a red cross, although she had no actual certainty that the object of her solicitude was a prisoner within it. Such had been the life of Constantia: the restlessness and anxiety of her heart had continually suggested some new pretext for visiting the gallery: fifty times a day had she listened for some sound, or peered through the windows of the circular room to discover some object; and her presence, at the identical moment when it was required, was solely attributable to this vigilance of affection. Her life she might have risked to succour any other person, if suddenly called upon to expose it; but her hopes and fears, her head, her heart, and her time, could not have been thus exclusively engrossed by any one but Jocelyn.

To him it was evident, from what he had heard, that she was aware of his being her neighbour; and when he combined her gene

rous defiance of danger and of calumny, the devotedness with which she had pressed his infected hand, and her enthusiastic prayers for his recovery, with the provident and unremitting attention that anticipated every want, as she anxiously watched over him in his convalescence, he felt himself driven to the painful conclusion, that she could never have thus dedicated herfelf to his preservation, unless she had been actuated by a passion which he felt it impossible to return. His gratitude was unbounded; he would gladly have sacrificed in her service the life that she had saved; but his affections it was no longer in his power to bestow, for he felt, when returning to life, as he had done when he imagined himself to be dying, that, however hopeless might be the -attachment, his whole undivided heart was with Julia Strickland, in the melancholy castle of Haelbeck.

Deeply impressed with this conviction, and anxious to undeceive Constantia as soon as pos