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thoughts, for the consciousness of loving her, and of being beloved, accompanied his steps, although he scarcely knew it, just as one who lives on a lake side, or by the murmur of a stream, may feel the brightness and the shadows of the one, and hear the constant music of the other, mingling as a remembrance or a dream with the impressions, thoughts, passions, and feelings of his ordinary human life. But now, what had been less pleasant or necessary to him all faded away, and he saw in his darkness, one image only———Fanny Raeburn———he heard in his darkness one sound only———Fanny Raeburn's voice. Was she to smile in another man's house? Surely, that could not be; for her smiles were his and to transfer them to another, seemed to him to be as impossible, as for a mother to forget her own children, and pour with equal fondness her smiles upon the face of another who belonged not so her blood. Yet such transference, such forgetfulness, such sad change had been, that he well knew, even in "the short and simple annals of the poor," which alone he had read; and who would blame, who would pity, who would remember the case of the deserted, and forsaken poor Blind Man?
Fanny Raeburn had always been a dutiful child and she listened to the arguments of her parents with, a heavy but composed heart. She was willing to obey them in all things in which it was her
