ROMANCE. 281 



every day on which we had not met. He staid but a 

 short time there, leaving me standing just where he had 

 found me, but there was no notch on that day. I on 

 my part knelt at a cold grave-stone and registered over 

 the dead a vow, rash and foolish perhaps ; but it was 

 kept/ 



From these suggestive glimpses, readers of imagin- 

 ation and sensibility will gather all the information that is 

 necessary upon the subject. This love affair was clearly 

 romantic, but not the less real on that account. A 

 judicious mother, reflecting probably that young ladies 

 of nineteen are not likely to cease to love for being told 

 to do so, removed the interdict, and, though marriage was 

 for the present to be considered as out of the question, 

 the young people were permitted to enjoy each other's 

 society. 



It w r ould be a mistake to suppose that the intel- 

 lectual benefit of their intercourse was entirely on the 

 side of the lady. Her mind, if not so well stored, 

 so deliberate, so patiently thoughtful, as that of her 

 lover, had the piercing clearness and acuteness of good 

 female intellect, and would sometimes strike direct to 

 the heart of a subject when circumspect and meditative 

 Hugh was gyrating round and round it. On one occa- 

 sion, for example, one, probably of many, the pair 

 had enjoyed a game of chop-logic apropos of that 

 venerable problem, the origin of evil. Miller's argument, 

 as placed before Miss Fraser, I cannot state in his own 

 words, but its substance is derivable from a letter of his 

 to Miss Dunbar of Boath. ' May not evil,' suggests 

 Hugh, who, however, pronounces the question, in the 

 essence of it, unanswerable, ' be the shade with which 

 good is contrasted that it may be known as good, the 

 sickness to which it is opposed as health, the deformity 



