But a few steps down the next turning stood the humble mansion of her father.

They reached it; and Lucille scarcely crossed the threshold, before she sank down, and for some minutes was insensible to pain.

It was left to the stranger to explain, and to beseech them immediately to send for a surgeon, "the most skilful, the most practised in the town," said he.

"See, I am rich, and this is the least I can do to atone to your generous daughter, for not forsaking even a stranger in peril." He held out his purse as he spoke, but the father refused the offer; and it saved the blind man some shame, that he could not see the blush of honest resentment with which so poor a species of renumeration was put aside.
The young man stayed till the surgeon arrived, till the arm was set; nor did he depart until he had obtained a promise from the mother that he should learn the next morning how the sufferer had passed the night.
The next morning, indeed, he had intended to quit a town that offers but little temptation to the traveller; but he tarried day after day, until Lucille herself accompanied her mother, to assure him of her recovery.
You know, at least I do, dearest Gertrude, that there is such a thing as love at the first meeting,--a secret, an unaccountable affinity between persons (strangers before) which draws them irresistibly together,--as if there were truth in Plato's beautiful fantasy, that our souls were a portion of the stars, and that spirits, thus attracted to each other, have drawn their original light from the same orb, and yearn for a renewal of their former union.

Yet without recurring to such fanciful solutions of a daily mystery, it was but natural that one in the forlorn and desolate condition of Eugene St.Amand should have felt a certain tenderness for a person who had so generously suffered for his sake.
The darkness to which he was condemned did not shut from his mind's eye the haunting images of Ideal beauty; rather, on the contrary, in his perpetual and unoccupied solitude, he fed the reveries of an imagination naturally warm, and a heart eager for sympathy and commune.
He had said rightly that his only test of beauty was in the melody of voice; and never had a softer or more thrilling tone than that of the young maiden touched upon his ear.