her daughter; and, except the weather was very
unfavourable, Lilian now rode daily with
Colonel Poyntz, who was a notable equestrian,
and often accompanied by Miss Jane Poyntz,
and other young ladies of the Hill. I was
generally relieved from my duties in time to join
her as she returned homewards. Thus we made
innocent appointments, openly, frankly, in her
mother's presence, she telling me beforehand
in what direction excursions had been planned
with Colonel Poyntz, and I promising to fall in
with the party—if my avocations would permit.
At my suggestion, Mrs. Ashleigh now opened
her house almost every evening to some of the
neighbouring families; Lilian was thus
habituated to the intercourse of young persons of
her own age. Music and dancing and childlike
games made the old house gay. And the Hill
gratefully acknowledged to Mrs. Poyntz " that
the Ashleighs were indeed a great acquisition."

But my happiness was not unchequered. In
thus unselfishly surrounding Lilian with others,
I felt the anguish of that jealousy which is
inseparable from those earlier stages of love,
when the lover as yet has won no right to that
self-confidence which can only spring from the
assurance that he is loved.

In these social reunions I remained aloof from
Lilian. I saw her courted by the gay young
admirers whom her beauty and her fortune drew
around her; her soft face brightening in the
exercise of the dance, which the gravity of my
profession rather than my years forbade me to join
—and her laugh, so musically subdued, ravishing
my ear and fretting my heart as if the laugh were
a mockery on my sombre self and my presumptuous
dreams. But no, suddenly, shyly, her
eyes would steal away from those about her,
steal to the corner in which I sat, as if they
missed me, and, meeting my own gaze, their
light softened before they turned away; and the
colour on her cheek would deepen, and to her
lip there came a smile different from the smile
that it shed on others. And then—and then—all
jealousy, all sadness vanished, and I felt the
glory which blends with the growing belief that
we are loved.

In that diviner epoch of man's mysterious
passion, when ideas of perfection and purity,
vague and fugitive before, start forth and
concentre themselves round one virgin shape—that
rises out from the sea of creation, welcomed by
the Hours and adorned by the Graces—how
the thought that this archetype of sweetness
and beauty singles himself from the millions,
singles himself for her choice, ennobles and lifts
up his being. Though after experience may
rebuke the mortal's illusion that mistook for a
daughter of Heaven a creature of clay like
himself, yet for a while the illusion has grandeur.
Though it comes from the senses which shall
later oppress and profane it, the senses at first
shrink into shade, awed and hushed by the
presence that charms them. All that is brightest
and best in the man has soared up like long
dormant instincts of Heaven, to greet and to
hallow what to him seems life's fairest dream of
the heavenly! Take the wings from the image
of Love, and the god disappears from the
form!

Thus, if at moments jealous doubt made my
torture, so the moment's relief from it sufficed
for my rapture. But I had a cause for disquiet
less acute but less varying than jealousy.

Despite Lilian's recovery from the special
illness which had more immediately absorbed my
care, I remained perplexed as to its cause and
true nature. To her mother I gave it the convenient
epithet of " nervous." But the epithet
did not explain to myself all the symptoms I
classified by it. There was still, at times, when
no cause was apparent or conjecturable, a sudden
change in the expression of her countenance;
in the beat of her pulse; the eye would become
fixed, the bloom would vanish, the pulse would
sink feebler and feebler till it could be scarcely
felt; yet there was no indication of heart
disease, of which such sudden lowering of life
is in itself sometime a warning indication. The
change would pass away after a few minutes,
during which she seemed unconscious, or, at
least, never spoke; never appeared to heed
what was said to her. But in the expression of
her countenance there was no character of
suffering or distress; on the contrary, a wondrous
serenity that made her beauty more beauteous,
her very youthfulness younger; and when this
spurious or partial kind of syncope passed, she
recovered at once without effort, without
acknowledging that she had felt faint or unwell,
but rather with a sense of recruited vitality, as
the weary obtain from a sleep. For the rest,
her spirits were more generally light and joyous
than I should have premised from her mother's
previous description. She would enter
mirthfully into the mirth of young companions round
her; she had evidently quick perception of the
sunny sides of life; an infantine gratitude for
kindness; an infantine joy in the trifles that
amuse only those who delight in tastes pure and
simple. But when talk rose into graver and
more contemplative topics, her attention became
earnest and absorbed; and, sometimes, a rich
eloquence such as I have never before or since
heard from lips so young, would startle me first
into a wondering silence, and soon into a
disapproving alarm. For the thoughts she then
uttered seemed to me too fantastic, too visionary,
too much akin to the vagaries of a wild though
beautiful imagination. And then I would seek
to check, to sober, to distract fancies with
which my reason had no sympathy, and the
indulgence of which I regarded as injurious to
the normal functions of the brain.

When thus, sometimes with a chilling sentence,
sometimes with a half-sarcastic laugh, I would
repress outpourings frank and musical as the
songs of a forest bird, she would look at me
with a kind of plaintive sorrow—often sigh
and shiver as she turned away. Only in these
modes did she show displeasure; otherwise ever
sweet and docile, and ever, if, seeing that
I had pained her, I asked forgiveness, humbling
herself rather to ask mine, and brightening our