Her exclamation, so beautifully denying self, so devoted in its charity, "Thank God, _you_ are saved!" uttered too in the moment of her own suffering, rang constantly upon his soul, and he yielded, without precisely defining their nature, to vague and delicious sentiments, that his youth had never awakened to till then.

And Lucille--the very accident that had happened to her on his behalf only deepened the interest she had already conceived for one who, in the first flush of youth, was thus cut off from the glad objects of life, and left to a night of years desolate and alone.

There is, to your beautiful and kindly sex, a natural inclination to _protect_.

This makes them the angels of sickness, the comforters of age, the fosterers of childhood; and this feeling, in Lucille peculiarly developed, had already inexpressibly linked her compassionate nature to the lot of the unfortunate traveller.

With ardent affections, and with thoughts beyond her station and her years, she was not without that modest vanity which made her painfully susceptible to her own deficiencies in beauty.
Instinctively conscious of how deeply she herself could love, she believed it impossible that she could ever be so loved in return.