The monastery; The abbot.

208 WAV E RLEY NOVELS.
lS an f tjHi ^pritti^tI
You call it an ill angel-it may be so,
But sure I ail, anioilg the ranks which fell,'Tis the first fiend e'er counsell'd nan to rise,
And win the bliss the sprite himself had forfeited.
OLD PLAY.
WE must resume our narrative at the period when Mary Avenel was
conveyed to the apartment which had been formerly occupied by the two
Glendinnings, and when her faithful attendant, Tibbie, had exhausted herself in useless attempts to compose and to comfort her. Father Eustace
also dealt forth with well-meant kindness those apophthegms and dogmata of
consolation, which friendship almost always offers to grief, though they are
uniformly offered in vain. She was at length left to indulge in the desolation of her own sorrowful feelings. She felt as those who, loving for the
first time, have lost what they-loved, before time and repeated calamity have
taught them that every loss is to a certain extent reparable or endurable.
Such grief may be conceived better than it can be described, as is well
known to those who have experienced it. But Mary Avenel had been taught
by the peculiarity of her situation, to regard herself as the Child of Destiny;
and the melancholy and reflecting turn of her disposition gave to her sorrows
a depth and breadth peculiar to her character. The grave - and it was a
bloody grave - had closed, as she believed, over the youth to whom she was
secretly, but most warmly attached; the force and ardour of Halbert's character bearing a singular correspondence to the energy of which her own was
capable. HIer sorrow did not exhaust itself in sighs and tears, but when the
first shock had passed away, concentrated itself with deep and steady meditation, to collect and calculate, like a bankrupt debtor, the full amount of
her loss. It seemed as if all that connected her with earth, had vanished
with this broken tie. She had never dared to anticipate the probability of
an ultimate union with lalbert, yet now his supposed fall seemed that of
the only tree which was to shelter her from the storm. She respected the
more gentle character, and more peaceful attainments, of the younger Glendinning; but it had not escaped her (what never indeed escaped woman in
such circumstances) that he was disposed to place himself in competition
with what she, the daughter of a proud and warlike race, deemed the more
manly qualities of his elder brother; and there is no time when a woman
does so little justice to the character of a surviving lover, as when comparing
him with the preferred rival of whom she has been recently deprived.
The motherly, but coarse kindness of Dame Glendinning, and the doatrng
fondness of her old domestic, seemed now the only kind feeling of which
she formed the object; and she could not but reflect how little these were to
be compared with the devoted attachment of a high-souled youth, whom the
least glance of her eye could command, as the high-mettled steed is
governed by the bridle of the rider. It was when plunged among these
desolating reflections, that Mary Avenel felt the void of mind, arising from
the narrow and bigoted ignorance in which Rome then educated the children of her church. Their whole religion was a ritual, and their prayers
were the formal iteration of unknown words, which, in the hour of affliction, could yield but little consolation to those who from habit resorted to
them. Unused to the practice of mental devotion, and of personal approach
to the Divine Presence by prayer, she could not help exclaiming in her distress, "There is no aid for me on earth, and I know not how to ask it from
Heaven!"
As she spoke thus in an agony of sorrow, she cast her eyes into the apart