intelligence that supper was on the table. Looking at herself in the
glass, and perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown
rather languid (probably by being exposed to the fervency of the
kitchen fire), she flung it on the floor, as unconcernedly as a
village girl would throw away a faded violet. The action seemed
proper to her character, although, methought, it would still more
have befitted the bounteous nature of this beautiful woman to scatter
fresh flowers from her hand, and to revive faded ones by her touch.
Nevertheless, it was a singular but irresistible effect; the presence
of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion, a
masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up
men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us
to live in. I tried to analyze this impression, but not with much
success.

"It really vexes me," observed Zenobia, as we left the room, "that Mr.
Hollingsworth should be such a laggard. I should not have thought
him at all the sort of person to be turned back by a puff of contrary
wind, or a few snowflakes drifting into his face."

"Do you know Hollingsworth personally?" I inquired.

"No; only as an auditor--auditress, I mean--of some of his lectures,"
said she. "What a voice he has! and what a man he is! Yet not so
much an intellectual man, I should say, as a great heart; at least,
he moved me more deeply than I think myself capable of being moved,
except by the stroke of a true, strong heart against my own. It is a
sad pity that he should have devoted his glorious powers to such a
grimy, unbeautiful, and positively hopeless object as this
reformation of criminals, about which he makes himself and his