CHAPTER XV.

"Is there in bowers of endless spring,
One known from all the seraph band,

By softer voice, by smile and wing

More exquisitely bland!

Here let him speed: to-day this hallowed air,

Is fragrant with a mother's first and fondest prayer."

KEBLE.

LITTLE did Aline, during her transit homewards, think of the discomfort of her conveyance. There is a certain pitch of crushed feeling-of wearied, grieved spirit, at which circumstancesso prominent before-are unheeded, unperceived. Worn and weary, in mind and body, the unhappy girl re-entered the house at Brompton,

of which she and her husband, had taken pos

session a few days previously.

Angelo was still absent; he had not returned

since she quitted the house.

Sinking down on the sofa, in her little drawing room, with scarce strength to divest herself of her bonnet and shawl, and casting them from her, she tore her rejected letter-till then convulsively clutched in her hand-to atoms, and threw the fragments through the window, to be scattered by the air; determining that poor Carlo should never, by her means, be made cognizant of this most unhappy adventure-the cruel mortification, the crushing, wounding rejection, to which she had exposed herself.

But Angelo learnt it in part ere long, since it became necessary to account, in some degree, for the sudden illness, from which, on his return home, he found his wife suffering. He was therefore informed by her maid, of the fatiguing drive of the afternoon; and when her perils being over, and a little son born, he poured

his joyful endearments in her ear, he at the same time chided her playfully for a perilous truancy, which might have proved so fatal in its effects, and asked her why she had gone out in so improper a conveyance, instead of waiting for the pretty little carriage he had promised her. Aline was obliged to confess something of the truth, whilst -though she earnestly strove to repress them— her sore weakness would not permit it to be so, and the tears forced themselves from her eyes down her pale cheeks at that wounding remembrance.

And then the husband's distress and indignation were extreme. He sank down on his knees, by the bedside, and covered her hand with kisses and tears.

"And they treated my Alina thus !—they sent my sweetest, my fairest from her father's door? Per Dio! é troppo crudele é troppo barbaro! and they once flattered-fawned upon the singer in their own proud home, nay, but the other night, sat and listened, smiled and

applauded, as if he had been an angel, and yet so to despise the man, that the wife of his bosom-their own daughter-must be trampled beneath their feet! Ah Alina, I will never sing to them again!" he murmured passionately -"I will starve-I will beg first-I will rather work with my own hands to maintain you!" and the young man buried his face on the bed.

"No Carlo!" Aline fondly murmured, as she soothingly passed her feeble hand over his ebon locks, "do not let it grieve you ;" and with a sad smile, quoting the words of Desdemona, in the Opera of Othello, she added— "Se il padre anche m' abandona,' we have a consolation now in this caro piccolino," and she pressed her babe to her bosom. "But," Aline continued, strengthened for the moment, by the prejudicial excitement, to which her husband's agitation had worked her, "did you say-did you say Carlo, that you sang at the Opera the other night? you never told me of that, but allowed me to chide you so peevishly, for leaving

me all that long evening, and till so late at night. Ah, I half suspected something of the sort, and it made me perhaps only the more unreasonable. But though not for myself I was irritable," she continued, as Angelo tried to explain, that it had been indeed to save her feelings, that he had concealed the truth, fearing what might have been her dislike and repugnance, on the occasion" it must not be so again, carissimo."

And Aline continued sweetly, "I must not stand in the way of your advantage or comfort in your profession. Fear not-I shall be but too proud-too pleased to be the wife of the unrivalled Opera singer-to hear of his success-his renown-to see the tears-the smiles like those of which I was the witness when so entranced, I listened to him at my first Opera, never dreaming of the bliss of having one day the privilege of calling that angelic singer, mine. But tell me-did you say"-and her cheek flushed fearfully, "did Lady Adelaide hear you the other night-oh! did she really listen to you, and then repulse me?-and my