his untiring ardour was bent upon constructing a new cylinder of other
materials. "Strange," he said to himself, "that the heat of the mover
aids not the movement;" and so, blundering near the truth, he laboured
on.

Sibyll, meanwhile, seated herself abstractedly on a heap of fagots
piled in the corner, and seemed busy in framing characters on the
dusty floor with the point of her tiny slipper. So fresh and fair and
young she seemed, in that murky atmosphere, that strange scene, and
beside that worn man, that it might have seemed to a poet as if the
youngest of the Graces were come to visit Mulciber at his forge.

The man pursued his work, the girl renewed her dreams, the dark
evening hour gradually stealing over both. The silence was unbroken,
for the forge and the model were now at rest, save by the grating of
Adam's file upon the metal, or by some ejaculation of complacency now
and then vented by the enthusiast. So, apart from the many-noised,
gaudy, babbling world without, even in the midst of that bloody,
turbulent, and semi-barbarous time, went on (the one neglected and
unknown, the other loathed and hated) the two movers of the ALL that
continues the airy life of the Beautiful from age to age,--the Woman's
dreaming Fancy and the Man's active Genius.




CHAPTER II.

MASTER ADAM WARNER GROWS A MISER, AND BEHAVES SHAMEFULLY.