with tendrils to throw them round the next plant, and therefore she
entertained the gentle guest who had lately found room in her heart
without a question or a scruple.

As Agnes related her childlike story of unconscious faith and love, her
listener felt himself strangely and bitterly agitated. It was a vision
of ignorant purity and unconsciousness rising before him, airy and
glowing as a child's soap-bubble, which one touch might annihilate; but
he felt a strange remorseful tenderness, a yearning admiration, at its
unsubstantial purity. There is something pleading and pitiful in the
simplicity of perfect ignorance,--a rare and delicate beauty in its
freshness, like the morning-glory cup, which, once withered by the heat,
no second morning can restore. Agnes had imparted to her confessor, by
a mysterious sympathy, something like the morning freshness of her own
soul; she had redeemed the idea of womanhood from gross associations,
and set before him a fair ideal of all that female tenderness and purity
may teach to man. Her prayers--well he believed in them,--but be set
his teeth with a strange spasm of inward passion,--when he thought
of her prayers and love being given to another. He tried to persuade
himself that this was only the fervor of pastoral zeal against a vile
robber who had seized the fairest lamb of the sheepfold; but there was
an intensely bitter, miserable feeling connected with it, that scorched
and burned his higher aspirations like a stream of lava running among
fresh leaves and flowers.

The conflict of his soul communicated a severity of earnestness to
his voice and manner which made Agnes tremble, as he put one probing
question after another, designed to awaken some consciousness of sin
in her soul. Still, though troubled and distressed by his apparent
disapprobation, her answers came always clear, honest, unfaltering, like