ly the most unspiritual quality in
the world, it was almost as effective as spiritual insight in making
him acquainted with whatever it suited him to discover. He now proved
it, considerably to my discomfiture, by detecting and recognizing me,
at my post of observation. Perhaps I ought to have blushed at being
caught in such an evident scrutiny of Professor Westervelt and his
affairs. Perhaps I did blush. Be that as it might, I retained
presence of mind enough not to make my position yet more irksome by the
poltroonery of drawing back.

Westervelt looked into the depths of the drawing-room, and beckoned.
Immediately afterwards Zenobia appeared at the window, with color much
heightened, and eyes which, as my conscience whispered me, were
shooting bright arrows, barbed with scorn, across the intervening
space, directed full at my sensibilities as a gentleman. If the truth
must be told, far as her flight-shot was, those arrows hit the mark.
She signified her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and
hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal. The next moment
she administered one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has
at hand, ready for any offence (and which she so seldom spares on due
occasion), by letting down a white linen curtain between the festoons
of the damask ones. It fell like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the
interval between the acts.

Priscilla had disappeared from the boudoir. But the dove still kept
her desolate perch on the peak of the attic window.

XIX. ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM

The remainder of the day, so far as I was concerned, was spent in
meditating on these recent incidents. I contrived, and alternately
rejected, innumerable methods of accounting for the presence of Zenobia
and Priscilla, and the connection of Westervelt with both. It must be
owned, too, that I had a keen, revengeful sense of the insult inflicted
by Zenobia's scornful recognition, and more particularly by her letting
down the curtain; as if such were the proper barrier to be interposed
between a character like hers and a perceptive faculty like mine. For,
was mine a mere vulgar curiosity? Zenobia should have known me better
than to suppose it. She should have been able to appreciate that
quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled me (often against
my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other
lives, and to endeavor--by generous sympathies, by delicat