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The baby's face looked, in the moonlight, white and pinched; and its sick hands were pressed together like two withered rose-leaves. "Let me kiss him," whispered Goldilocks smiling. But bitter tears rolled down Despard's cheeks. Drawing his little sword from its sheath, he pricked the baby's heart till one red drop, the life-drop, stained the steel. The sick baby ceased to breathe.

'Twas thine own genius gave the final blow, And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low; So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain, No more through rolling clouds to soar again, View'd his own feather on the fatal dart, And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart; Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel He nursed the pinion which impell'd the steel, While the same plumage that had warm'd his nest, Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast,

There had been sorrow in the tale of my friend, temptation at least, if not sinful yielding, labor and pain, which had broken down the fair mind itself, but it had all created a gracious form for the memory to dwell on, an undying association with the "Tancredi," as beautiful, instructive, and joy-giving as the "Divino Amore" of Raphael, the exquisite onyx heads in the "Cabinet of Gems," or that divine prelude the Englishman was at that moment pouring out from his piano in a neighboring palazzo, in a flood of harmony as golden and rich as the wine of Capri, every note of which, we know, had been a life-drop wrung from the proud, breaking heart of Chopin, when he sat alone, that solemn, stormy midnight, in the old convent-chamber at Majorca.

Were your sister indeed the insignificant person she deserves to be, I would willingly leave her to the fate, the wretched fate, of the wife of a man, whose very person, resembling as it does his wretched father, ought to remind you of the folly and vice it typifies but remember, Lady Idris, it is not alone the once royal blood of England that colours your veins, you are a Princess of Austria, and every life-drop is akin to emperors and kings.