acquaintance, she was wary of speaking of Redmond. Her last
conversation with me revealed her thoughts, and awakened feelings which
I thought I had buffeted down. The tone of Harry Lothrop's note
perplexed me, and I found myself drifting back into an old state of
mind I had reason to dread.

As I said, the autumn had come round. Its quiet days, its sombre
nights, filled my soul with melancholy. The lonesome moan of the sea
and the waiting stillness of the woods were just the same a year ago;
but Laura was dead, and Nature grieved me. Yet none of us are in one
mood long, and at this very time there were intervals when I found
something delicious in life, either in myself or the atmosphere.

"Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams."

A golden morning, a starry night, the azure round of the sky, the
undulating horizon of sea, the blue haze which rose and fell over the
distant hills, the freshness of youth, the power of beauty,--all gave
me deep voluptuous dreams.

I can afford to confess that I possessed beauty; for half my faults and
miseries arose from the fact of my being beautiful. I was not vain, but
as conscious of my beauty as I was of that of a flower, and sometimes
it intoxicated me. For, in spite of the comforting novels of the Jane
Eyre school, it is hardly possible to set an undue value upon beauty;
it defies ennui.

As I expected, Harry Lothrop came to see me. The sad remembrance of
Laura's death prevented any ceremony between us; we met as old