A month after my first call upon the Wangraves, I joined them on their journey to Vallambrosa, where they proposed to take refuge from the sultry coming of the Italian autumn. My happiness would not have been arranged after the manner of this world's happiness, if I had been the only addition to their party up the mountain. They had received with open arms, a few days before leaving Lucca, a young man from the neighborhood of their own home, and who, I saw with half a glance, was the very Eidolon and type of what Mr. Wangrave would desire as a fitting match for his daughter. From the allusions to him that had preceded his coming, I had learned that he was the heir to a brilliant fortune, and was coming to his old friends to be congratulated on his appointment to a captaincy in the Queen's Guards--as pretty a case of an "irresistible" as could well have been compounded for expectation. And when he came--the absolute model of a youth of noble beauty--all frankness, good manners, joyousness, and confidence, I summoned courage to look alternately at Stephania and him, and the hope, the daring hope that I had never yet named to myself, but which was already master of my heart, and its every pulse and capability, dropped prostrate and lifeless in my bosom. If he did but offer her the life-minute of love, of which I would give her, it seemed to me, for the same price, an eternity of countless existences--if he should but give her a careless word, where I could wring a passionate utterance out of the aching blood of my very heart--she must needs be his. She would be a star else that would resign an orbit in the fair sky, to illumine a dim cave; a flower that would rather bloom on a bleak moor, than in the garden of a king--for, with such crushing comparisons, did I irresistibly see myself as I remembered my own shape and features, and my far humbler fortunes than his, standing in her presence beside him.
Oh! how every thing contributed to enhance the beauty of that young man. How the mellow and harmonizing tenderness of the light of the Italian sky gave sentiment to his oval cheek, depth to his gray-blue eye, meaning to their overfolding and thick-fringed lashes. Whatever he said with his finely-cut lips, was _looked_ into twenty times its meaning by the beauty of their motion in that languid atmosphere--an atmosphere that seemed only breathed for his embellishment and Stephania's. Every posture he took seemed a happy and rare accident, which a painter should have been there to see. The sunsets, the moonlight, the chance back-ground and fore-ground, of vines and rocks--every thing seemed in conspiracy to heighten his effect, and make of him a faultless picture of a lover.