since heard from lips so young, would startle me first into a wondering
silence, and soon into a disapproving alarm: for the thoughts she then
uttered seemed to me too fantastic, too visionary, too much akin to the
vagaries of a wild though beautiful imagination. And then I would seek to
check, to sober, to distract fancies with which my reason had no sympathy,
and the indulgence of which I regarded as injurious to the normal
functions of the brain.

When thus, sometimes with a chilling sentence, sometimes with a
half-sarcastic laugh, I would repress outpourings frank and musical as the
songs of a forest-bird, she would look at me with a kind of plaintive
sorrow,--often sigh and shiver as she turned away. Only in those modes
did she show displeasure; otherwise ever sweet and docile, and ever, if,
seeing that I had pained her, I asked forgiveness, humbling herself rather
to ask mine, and brightening our reconciliation with her angel smile. As
yet I had not dared to speak of love; as yet I gazed on her as the captive
gazes on the flowers and the stars through the gratings of his cell,
murmuring to himself, "When shall the doors unclose?"




CHAPTER XVI.

It was with a wrath suppressed in the presence of the fair ambassadress,
that Mr. Vigors had received from Mrs. Poyntz the intelligence that I had
replaced Dr. Jones at Abbots' House not less abruptly than Dr. Jones had
previously supplanted me. As Mrs. Poyntz took upon herself the whole
responsibility of this change, Mr. Vigors did not venture to condemn it to
her face; for the Administrator of Laws was at heart no little in awe of