become doubly valuable if he were to owe its preservation to one who appeared to be as compassionate as she was beautiful, which was the utmost compliment that he could pay to her humanity, and concluded his passionate address with the rather humiliating avowal, that necessity must soon expel him from the asylum he had chosen, unless he could procure food, of which he had tasted none for many hours. "Food!" cried Adeline with a look of infinite disappointment and surprise, “how excessively unromantic! In the Knight of the Sun, I remember that Roseclaire and his brother, the sons of the Emperor of Constantinople, fasted for a whole fortnight without inconvenience. Mais, c'est égal; modern heroes are not like those in the days of Chivalry. I will manage to bring you something, à la derobé! allons! allons! I am dying to see you sink into the earth like a mole. You must not mind being buried alive; in the country we are all in the same predicament. There, take care how you get down. How dark it looks below! Vraiment, cela me fait horreur. A Dieu ne plaise, that you should be discovered. Provoking! I see by the glass that my tour is again all out Adieu! au revoir: fiez vous à moi. ་ of curl. Draw the trap-door quite close again. May I die! if I shall ever call you any thing but Arcadius; of course you have read of Prince Arcadius, in the Royal Romance, who lived in a cavern six weeks for love of the Princess Cloria. The trap-door is shut. Adieu! adieu! Voilà une plaisante aventure!" CHAPTER X. Love me not for comely grace, HERE was a delightful occurrence, which not only came to break the monotony of Adeline's existence, but seemed expressly calculated to inflame an imagination already kindled by the perusal of French romances. It was, indeed, an incident that possessed every element of attraction to a mind like hers;-its novelty and mystery were combined with a due portion of the terrible to preserve the interest, for the consequences of a discovery would probably be fatal; and as to love, she was not only éperdument amoureuse at the very first sight, but beheld in the passionate earnestness of Reuben's manner while he was kneeling at her feet, as well as in every subsequent word, look, and gesture, the confession of a reciprocal flame, which, like all those she had ever read of, was to rage with a desperate and inextinguishable ardour. Elated, enraptured, at the thought that she was acting the part of a heroine, she stole covertly to the summer-house with a basket of provisions, snatching every possible opportunity of repeating her visits; and, far from thinking that she was lowering herself, or committing any impropriety, by these clandestine interviews, she became so exalted in her own opinion, as to consider herself infinitely superior to the common daughters of earth, while she was thus tripping to the place of rendezvous. When there, however, her demeanour was common-place enough, she coquetted, laughed, rattled, talked French, sang songs in the same language to the accompaniment of her guitar, arranged her coiffure or altered a patch in the glass was thrown into the prettiest and most becoming terrors imaginable whenever she heard any unexpected noise, and listened very patiently to Reuben's plans for his escape, unless when she interrupted him to moot a point out of some high-flown romance, to ask his opinion of a sweet fancied scarf just received from London, or to consult him whether the scollops of her new Sac à la Sedley should be edged with gold or silver. Struck as Reuben had been by her beauty at their first interview, as well as by a certain air of high-bred, though somewhat fantastical elegance in her appearance, and not less flattered by the instant ardour with which she had embraced his cause, such conversation as we have described could not fail to lower his estimate of her understanding. True, he was a lover of the romantic; but it must be the intuitive romance of the intellect, not that borrowed from the ponderous tomes of Scuderi and Calprenéde: he doated upon enthusiasm ; but it |