BILLET IV.

"I have called twice at your door, and "twice have been denied. You mistake, "beautiful Imogen, the purport of my vi"sit: it is not the importunities of a cre"ditor, but the humble, the impassioned, "solicitations of a lover, you evade. I

came not, enchanting woman, to make "a paltry pecuniary claim, but such only "as love demands, and love alone can "grant. You are still opulent in all that "is, most precious and desirable--youth, beauty, genius, and tenderness. In competition with these divine possessions, perish all the riches of the earth! The "sordid world is unworthy of you; oppressed by the malice of your enemies,

betrayed by the envy of those who called "themselves your friends, abandoned by "the too-easily sated de Beauvilliers, de"serted by the cold phlegmatic de Sor

ville, there yet lives a heart devoted to you with all its energies-there yet exists "one who only waits your permission to

The heart-wounding letters dropped one by one from the trembling hands of Imogen. The beautiful veil her fancy had flung over the world was now entirely withdrawn. The reluctance with which she had admitted those progressive proofs of its turpitude, which experience hourly forced on her, now no longer existed to smooth the asperity of her disappointed hopes. It was in vain she endeavoured to cling to the bosom of philanthrophy; the individual instances of vice, depravity, and ingratitude, she now witnessed, surrounded her as with a mist, and beyond this gloomy sphere her feelings did not suf fer her to extend her view. The cold unkindness of mademoiselle d'Entragues, the base ingratitude of de Servin, struck her more than even the unfriendly negligence of mademoiselle de Beuil, or the equivo

cal and scarcely-understood insult of de Sancy.

Borne away with the impetuosity of her feelings, she was at first going to write to them all; but how touch the hearts of those who had given her such irrefragable proofs that they had disclaimed all feeling, all humanity? She, therefore, (when her emotion was somewhat subsided,) wrapped up the respective sums due to each in their own respective billets, and enclosing each in a blank sheet of paper, dispatched her page to the ladies d'Entragues and de Beuil, and Jaques to monsieur de Servin and the marquis de Sancy.

And now, for the first time, her "bo"som's lord sat lightly on his throne." Her debts all paid, her estate unincumbered, and a sum in her purse more than equal to the expences of her journey to Provence; prostrate on the earth, in the glowing effusions of a meek and grateful soul, she offered up her thanksgivings to that Being who had not turned from her "the light of his countenance" when,

wandering in the dark mazes of error, she had implored his protection; who, in endowing her with those passions which sweeten and embitter life, which lead to bliss and verge to misery, had given her in a strong and good mind an infallible corrective and restraint.

The greater cause of her anxiety and distress being now obviated, the injury she had done to others being repaired, she had leisure to examine into the source of that she had herself sustained. The neglect, the total desertion of all her female and many of her male friends, (for still a number of dissipated men of rauk and fashion importuned her door, but importuned in vain,) she bad hitherto ascribed to the derangement of her affairs; the festive ball, the midnight revel, the fantastic masque, no longer lured them to her house, nor could she now expect a continuation of that society which only sought her for its own selfish gratification.

But, now that her mind, relieved from

the pressure of poignant distress, had the power to plume the dropping wing of its keen but latent observation, she perceived a secondary cause had influenced the absence of those fluttering moths which had spread their gilded pinions around the beamy flame of her prosperous fortune, but fled with its extinction. The oblique hints of mademoiselle d'Entragues, relative to her adventure at Laon; the scandalous reports it had given rise to the invidious comments made on her exhibition at the hotel de Montmorency; her afterwards being denied admittance there: the manner in which she had been received at the hotel de Belleisle; the presence of the lady Magdelaine, and the humiliating history of the poor Novice of St. Dominick, told (she doubted not) with many éxaggerating circumstances which malice was ready to invent and prejudice to receive; the assertion of the bishop de Rouenne, "that he would persist in be