before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than that--
I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure he knew
would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face.
That was exactly present to me--by which I mean the face was--
when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long
June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations
and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot--
and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for--
was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real.
He did stand there!--but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of
the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me.
This tower was one of a pair--square, incongruous, crenelated structures--
that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see
little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite
ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities,
redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor
of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity,
from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past.
I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit
in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk,
by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at
such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed
most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember,
two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock
of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a
violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met
my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed.
There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which,