that you should be discovered. Provoking! I see by the glass that my tour is again all out of curl. Adieu! au revoir : fiez vous à moi. 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!" d 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 must be the genuine effusion of the heart, not the cold frivolous emanation of the head: poetry was his idol; but it was the lofty, the passionate, or the profound, not the flat and frigid amorousness, or the affected fervours, of French chansonettes. Wearied with her girlish inanity and Frenchified phrases, finding nothing lively in her vapid rattle, and a good deal that struck him as unfeminine in her forwardness, especially as he felt the unfavourable construction that would be put upon their furtive meetings, should they ever chance to be discovered, he became impatient to break them off by making his escape; with which view he had already stolen out several times to reconnoitre, but had as often been driven back by the appearance of troops and patrolling parties in the neighbourhood. Adeline, however, dreamt not of any such speedy termination to their courtship, for such she fully considered it to be. Fancying that it would now become her to be pensive and sentimental, she sang her tenderest and most melting songs, assumed a languishing look, suffered her |