a strange dream.
restless are the dreams of the lover that is young. ferdinand armine started awake from the agony of a terrible slumber. he had been walking in a garden with henrietta temple, her hand was clasped in his, her eyes fixed on the ground, as he whispered delicious words. his face was flushed, his speech panting and low. gently he wound his vacant arm round her graceful form; she looked up, her speaking eyes met his, and their trembling lips seemed about to cling into a———
when lo! the splendour of the garden faded, and all seemed changed and dim; instead of the beautiful arched walks, in which a moment before they appeared to wander, it was beneath the vaulted roof of some temple that they now moved; instead of the bed of glowing flowers from which he was about to pluck an offering for her bosom, an altar rose, from the centre of which upsprang a quick and lurid tongue of fire. the dreamer gazed upon his companion, and her form was tinted with the dusky hue of the flame, and she held to her countenance a scarf, as if pressed by the unnatural heat. great fear suddenly came over him. with haste, yet with tenderness, he himself withdrew the scarf from the face of his companion, and this movement revealed the visage of miss grandison.
ferdinand armine awoke and started up in his bed. before him still appeared the unexpected figure. he jumped out of bed, he gazed upon the form with staring eyes and open mouth. she was there, assuredly she was there; it was katherine, katherine his betrothed, sad and reproachful. the figure faded before him; he advanced with outstretched hand; in his desperation he determined to clutch the escaping form: and he found in his grasp his dressing-gown, which he had thrown over the back of a chair.
‘a dream, and but a dream, after all,’ he muttered to himself; ‘and yet a strange one.’
his brow was heated; he opened the casement. it was still night; the moon had vanished, but the stars were still shining. he recalled with an effort the scene with which he had become acquainted yesterday for the first time. before him, serene and still, rose the bowers of ducie. and their mistress? that angelic form whose hand he had clasped in his dream, was not then merely a shadow. she breathed, she lived, and under the same roof. henrietta temple was at this moment under the same roof as himself: and what were her slumbers? were they wild as his own, or sweet and innocent as herself? did his form flit over her closed vision at this charmed hour, as hers had visited his? had it been scared away by an apparition as awful? bore anyone to her the same relation as katherine grandison to him? a fearful surmise, that had occurred to him now for the first time, and which it seemed could never again quit his brain. the stars faded away, the breath of morn was abroad, the chant of birds arose. exhausted in body and in mind, ferdinand armine flung himself upon his bed, and soon was lost in slumbers undisturbed as the tomb.
