people become insane, I should suppose; offences against public morality,
female license, are more numerous; suicides, murders, all ungovernable
outbreaks of men's thoughts, embodying themselves in wild acts, take place
more frequently, and with less horror to the lookers-on. So [with]
Septimius; there was not, as there would have been at an ordinary time,
the same calmness and truth in the public observation, scrutinizing
everything with its keen criticism, in that time of seething opinions and
overturned principles; a new time was coming, and Septimius's phase of
novelty attracted less attention so far as it was known.

So he continued to brood over the manuscript in his study, and to hide it
under lock and key in a recess of the wall, as if it were a secret of
murder; to walk, too, on his hill-top, where at sunset always came the
pale, crazy maiden, who still seemed to watch the little hillock with a
pertinacious care that was strange to Septimius. By and by came the winter
and the deep snows; and even then, unwilling to give up his habitual place
of exercise, the monotonousness of which promoted his wish to keep before
his mind one subject of thought, Septimius wore a path through the snow,
and still walked there. Here, however, he lost for a time the
companionship of the girl; for when the first snow came, she shivered, and
looked at its white heap over the hillock, and said to Septimius, "I will
look for it again in spring."

[_Septimius is at the point of despair for want of a guide in his
studies_.]

The winter swept over, and spring was just beginning to spread its green
flush over the more favored exposures of the landscape, although on the
north side of stone-walls, and the northern nooks of hills, there were
still the remnants of snow-drifts. Septimius's hill-top, which was of a