th perfect distinctness, somewhere in the
wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of the
disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt. It brought my
thoughts back to our recent interview. I recognized as chiefly due to
this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which just now had
filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better purposes. And
it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking at
Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream, and at the
noble earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at Priscilla, whose
impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease and beauty. The
essential charm of each had vanished. There are some spheres the
contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure,
deforms the beautiful. It must be a mind of uncommon strength, and
little impressibility, that can permit itself the habit of such
intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated; and yet the
Professor's tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a
cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and
makes the rest ridiculous. I detested this kind of man; and all the
more because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him.

Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay in
the vicinity of my tree. Soon I caught glimpses of two figures--a
woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together
as they advanced.

Zenobia had a rich though varying color. It was, most of the while, a
flame, and anon a sudden paleness. Her eyes glowed, so that their
light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle
from some bright object on the ground. Her gestures were free, and
strikingly impressive. The whole woman was alive with a passionate
intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty
culminated. Any passion would have become her well; and passionate
love, perhaps, the best of all. This was not love, but anger, largely
intermixed with scorn. Yet the idea strangely forced itself upon me,
that there was a sort of familiarity between these two companions,
necessarily the result of an intimate love,--on Zenobia's part, at
least,--in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself into as
intimate a hatred, for all futurity. As they passed among the trees,
reckless as her movement was, she took good heed that even the hem of