reply. He ventured to put his hand on her shoulder, continuing softly to
address her. She was flesh and blood. Evan stooped his head to catch a
whisper from her mouth, but nothing save a heavier fall of the breath she
took, as of one painfully waking, was heard.

A misery beyond our own is a wholesome picture for youth, and though we
may not for the moment compare the deep with the lower deep, we, if we
have a heart for outer sorrows, can forget ourselves in it. Evan had
just been accusing the heavens of conspiracy to disgrace him. Those
patient heavens had listened, as is their wont. They had viewed and had
not been disordered by his mental frenzies. It is certainly hard that
they do not come down to us, and condescend to tell us what they mean,
and be dumb-foundered by the perspicuity of our arguments the argument,
for instance, that they have not fashioned us for the science of the
shears, and do yet impel us to wield them. Nevertheless, they to whom
mortal life has ceased to be a long matter perceive that our appeals for
conviction are answered, now and then very closely upon the call. When
we have cast off the scales of hope and fancy, and surrender our claims
on mad chance, it is given us to see that some plan is working out: that
the heavens, icy as they are to the pangs of our blood, have been
throughout speaking to our souls; and, according to the strength there
existing, we learn to comprehend them. But their language is an element
of Time, whom primarily we have to know.

Evan Harrington was young. He wished not to clothe the generation. What
was to the remainder of the exiled sons of Adam simply the brand of
expulsion from Paradise, was to him hell. In his agony, anything less
than an angel, soft-voiced in his path, would not have satisfied the poor
boy, and here was this wretched outcast, and instead of being relieved,
he was to act the reliever!