Gertrude smiled her thanks.

"I feel better than I have done for weeks," said she; "and when once we
get into the Rhine, you will see me grow so strong as to shock all your
interest for me."

"Ah, would to Heaven my interest for you may be put to such an ordeal!"
said Trevylyan; and they turned slowly to the inn, where Gertrude's
father already awaited them.

Trevylyan was of a wild, a resolute, and an active nature. Thrown on the
world at the age of sixteen, he had passed his youth in alternate
pleasure, travel, and solitary study. At the age in which manhood is
least susceptible to caprice, and most perhaps to passion, he fell in
love with the loveliest person that ever dawned upon a poet's vision. I
say this without exaggeration, for Gertrude Vane's was indeed the beauty,
but the perishable beauty, of a dream. It happened most singularly to
Trevylyan (but he was a singular man), that being naturally one whose
affections it was very difficult to excite, he should have fallen in love
at first sight with a person whose disease, already declared, would have
deterred any other heart from risking its treasures on a bark so utterly
unfitted for the voyage of life. Consumption, but consumption in its
most beautiful shape, had set its seal upon Gertrude Vane, when Trevylyan
first saw her, and at once loved. He knew the danger of the disease; he
did not, except at intervals, deceive himself; he wrestled against the
new passion: but, stern as his nature was, he could not conquer it. He
loved, he confessed his love, and Gertrude returned it.

In a love like this, there is something ineffably beautiful,--it is
essentially the poetry of passion. Desire grows hallowed by fear, and,