is garnered up, be with us there, instead of that
weary World which has so magically vanished
away from the eye and the thought, then does
the change make one of those rare epochs of life
in which the charm is the stillness. In the pause
from all, by which our own turbulent struggles
for happiness trouble existence, we feel with a
rapt amaze how calm a thing it is to be happy.
And so as the night, in deepening, brightened,
Lilian and I wandered by the starry lake.
Conscious of no evil in ourselves, how secure we
felt from evil! A few days more—a few days
more, and we two should be as one. And that
thought we uttered in many forms of words,
brooding over it in the long intervals of
enamoured silence.

And when we turned back to the quiet inn at
which we had taken up our abode, and her mother,
with her soft face, advanced to meet us, I said
to Lilian:

"Would that in these scenes we could fix our
home for life, away and afar from the dull town
we have left behind us, with the fret of its
wearying cares and the jar of its idle babble!"

"And why not, Allen? Why not? But no,
you would not be happy."

"Not be happy, and with you? Sceptic! by
what reasonings do you arrive at that ungracious
conclusion?"

"The heart loves repose and the soul
contemplation, but the mind needs action. Is it not
so?"

"Where learned you that aphorism, out of
place on such rosy lips!"

"I learned it in studying you," murmured
Lilian, tenderly.

Here Mrs. Ashleigh joined us. For the first
time I slept under the same roof as Lilian. And
I forgot that the universe contained an enigma
to solve or an enemy to fear.

CHAPTER LXI.

Twenty days—the happiest my life had ever
known—thus glided on. Apart from the charm
which love bestows on the beloved, there was
that in Lilian's conversation which made her a
delightful companion. Whether it was that, in
this pause from the toils of my career, my mind
could more pliantly supple itself to her graceful
imagination, or that her imagination itself was
less vague and dreamy amidst those rural scenes
which realised in their loveliness and grandeur
its long-conceived ideals, than it had been in
the petty garden-ground neighboured by the
stir and hubbub of the busy town,—in much
that I had once slighted or contemned as the
vagaries of undisciplined fancy, I now recognised
the sparkle and play of an intuitive genius
lighting up many a depth obscure to instructed
thought. It is with some characters as with the
subtler and more ethereal order of poets. To
appreciate them we must suspend the course of
artificial life. In the city we call them dreamers,
on the mountain-top we find them interpreters.

In Lilian, the sympathy with Nature was not,
as in Margrave, from the joy and sense of
Nature's lavish vitality, it was refined into
exquisite perception of the diviner spirit by which
that vitality is informed. Thus, like the artist,
from outward forms of beauty she drew forth the
covert types, lending to things the most familiar
exquisite meanings unconceived before. For it
is truly said by a wise critic of old, that " the
attribute of Art is to suggest infinitely more
than it expresses," and such suggestions, passing
from the artist's innermost thought into the
mind that receives them, open on and on into
the Infinite of Ideas, as a moonlit wave struck by
a passing oar impels wave upon wave along one
track of light.

So the days glided by, and brought the eve
of our bridal morn. It had been settled that,
after the ceremony (which was to be performed
by license in the village church, at no great
distance, which adjoined my paternal home now
passed away to strangers), we should make a
short excursion into Scotland; leaving Mrs.
Ashleigh to await our return at the little inn.

I had retired to my own room to answer some
letters from anxious patients, and having finished
these, I looked into my trunk for a Guide-Book
to the North, which I had brought with me.
My hand came upon Margrave's wand, and
remembering that strange thrill which had passed
through me when I last handled it, I drew it
forth, resolved to examine calmly if I could
detect the cause of the sensation. It was not
now the time of night in which the imagination
is most liable to credulous impressions, nor was
I now in the anxious and jaded state of mind in
which such impressions may be the more readily
conceived. The sun was slowly setting over the
delicious landscape; the air cool and serene; my
thoughts collected; heart and conscience alike at
peace. I took, then, the wand, and adjusted it
to the palm of the hand as I had done before. I
felt the slight touch of the delicate wire within,
and again the thrill! I did not this time recoil;
I continued to grasp the wand, and sought
deliberately to analyse my own sensations in the
contact. There came over me an increased
consciousness of vital power; a certain exhiliration,
elasticity, vigour, such as a strong cordial may
produce on a fainting man. All the forces of my
frame seemed refreshed, redoubled; and as such
effects on the physical system are ordinarily
accompanied by correspondent effects on the mind,
so I was sensible of a proud elation of spirits, a
kind of defying, superb self-glorying. All fear
seemed blotted out from my thought, as a weakness
impossible to the grandeur and might which
belong to Intellectual Man; I felt as if it were a
royal delight to scorn Earth and its opinions,
brave Hades and its spectres. Rapidly this
new-born arrogance enlarged itself into desires
vague but daring; my mind reverting to the wild
phenomena associated with its memories of
Margrave, I said, half-aloud, " If a creature so
beneath myself in constancy of will and
completion of thought can wrest from Nature