a mother to Guyon. In her house he had passed his boyhood, and he loved her and Delphine, his fostersister, with his whole heart. The spoiler had not entered that small and humble dwelling, and Guyon found its gentle inmates at work in their pleasant upper parlour, which looked out upon a small herbgarden behind the house. He soon perceived that his determination had not reached them; and he resolved not to mention it, but to leave a letter for them at his own house. His efforts to be cheerful were successful: he conversed with an appearance of playful animation, and quitted the room without betraying any signs of the agony which wrung his bosom. He had not been gone more than a minute when Delphine remembered that she had not given him a small bouquet of lavender and vervain, and some other fragrant herbs and flowers, which she had gathered for Guyon, who seldom passed a day without seeing her. She ran quickly down stairs, and opening the door of the house, looked up the street, intending to call him back and offer him the fresh bouquet. Guyon was not to be seen. Delphine closed the door much disappointed, and was returning to her mother, when she heard a deep-drawn sigh very near her; she stopped and looked around. The door of a little dark chamber, in the front of the house, had started open, as she closed that leading into the street. Guyon was

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there, kneeling on the ground, his hands raised, and spread out towards heaven, as if asking a blessing from thence; his face had quite lost the calm cheerfulness which she had last seen there, and his chest seemed to heave with suppressed anguish. Delphine would fain have entered, but she dared not; she felt that Guyon might deem her presence an intrusion. She turned away, and stole lightly up stairs; she sate down upon the highest step, and waited to hear Guyon enter the passage beneath. She heard the latch of the street-door moved by his hand, and then she ran down to stop him. "Dear Marc, are you still here?" she said faintly, "I am glad to find you, I had gathered these herbs and flowers for you, and I forgot them; their smell may be pleasant to you in your dangerous visits to the dying. Delphine held out the flowers, but could not say another word. Guyon himself seemed half unconscious that she was speaking, he appeared lost in agonizing thoughts: at last with some calmness, he took her hand and led her to the room he had just quitted. 66 May I trust you, Delphine?" he said, in a whisper, "can you trust yourself? Will you near me, not as a mere woman, but as a faithful disciple of Him who was a man of sorrows, and deeply acquainted with grief? You do not answer me-I should not have spoken thus, but I believe that you have witnessed my anguish of soul in this chamber. I thought that some person had

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passed along the passage, and when I saw you, your countenance told me who that person was. May I go on?" "You may,” replied Delphine, without raising her eyes, "These are, I know, fearful times," she added," and we live daily prepared for some great calamity." She now sat still as death, she heard every word which Guyon spoke. “Are you ill, Delphine ?" he said wildly, when he had finished speaking :— 66 you are ill. The shock has been too great for my sweet sister." "No, no, I am not ill," she replied,- and never once did she raise her eyes. "I shall do all that you would have me."Guyon rose up from her side and kissed her cold cheek, yet he still lingered, and looked down upon her with tender affection. "No, I am not ill," she repeated, "and you must go. But take this," she added, in the same low, mournful voice, holding out to him again the little bunch of herbs, which she had kept all the while in her hand.-Delphine was alone; she laid her head upon the table beside her and closed her eyes, for a cold torpor seemed to have crept on all her faculties. "Oh! would to God that I could die with him!" she at length said, starting up, "Oh that I might share with him in the dangers of that horrid work!-If he were one mass of vile corruption, as he will be but too soon, I could rejoice to pillow his poor head upon this throbbing breast!— And he has loved another!" she exclaimed, with a

deep, dreary-sounding voice-" He has not even guessed that I love him as my own soul! He makes me the confident of his feelings, as if no weight of agony could break this weak heart! He fears for what my mother will suffer, as if she had ever loved him as her wretched daughter does!"

It was an hour after midnight when Guyon descended the steps of the Bishop's palace :-A young man had died the morning before, and he proceeded immediately to the house where the corpse was deposited. The deceased had been the last survivor of a large family, all of whom had fallen victims to the plague. His father, a rich merchant, died only the day before his child sickened. There was an open space before this house of death, planted with plane and linden trees, in the midst of which a fountain of limpid water refreshed the air, and fell into a circular basin; around this fountain was a range of low seats hewn out of the rough marble. The night was dark, and Guyon, followed by a single attendant, was walking along the last silent street leading to the house of death, when his servant called on him to stop. A person whom he had observed on the opposite side of the street had suddenly fallen to the ground. Guyon stopped immediately, and he heard a low moaning as of a person in pain. They crossed over, and Guyon lifted up one who appeared to be a female, and who had been thrown down by some

thing which lay in a dark mass upon the pavement; as he supported this female, the servant held down the lantern, and Guyon beheld the corpse of a poor wretch who had fallen dead of the plague, and lay unburied by the way-side. He turned, and Delphine (for it was she whom he had lifted up) had disappeared. She had not spoken-he had not seen her face and, undiscovered, she had left him.-Her mother had retired to rest some hours, when Delphine, leaving a note with these few words, "Guyon is ill," on her table, had stolen softly from the house, and hastened towards the Bishop's palace. She had not waited long before Guyon appeared. The lamps that burned before an image of the Virgin in a niche above the gateway, revealed plainly to her sight his tall and graceful form; and, guided by the gleam of his servant's lantern, she had cautiously followed their steps. Guyon entered the fatal house, and Delphine sat down upon the edge of the fountain before it. She had cut her forehead in falling upon the hard pavement, and she now washed the blood from her face, with trembling hands, and bound up the wound, which still bled profusely. Long did she sit beside that fountain, while not a sound disturbed the calm stillness of the night, except the light splashing of the waters, and the waving of the leafy boughs above her head. Once or twice she saw a light in some of the upper chambers, and the shadows of human forms