it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true
that what she saw meant a great deal. It meant the dawning in Myrtle
Hazard of one of her as yet unlived secondary lives. Bathsheba's virgin
perceptions had caught a faint early ray of its glimmering twilight.

She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has made
seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and that she
did not know about Susan's sentiments. Only, as they had kept so long to
each other, she supposed there must be love between them.

Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its
perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to look
upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds of
Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty fancies.
She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her eyes
fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified ancestress, but on that
other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the splendors of
her full-blown womanhood.

The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as the
glance at him already given might have foreshadowed. But his features
had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and the sober
tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had given him a
maturity beyond his years. The story was not an uncommon one. At
sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream. At eighteen he had awoke, and
found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to his so that its
life was dependent on his own. Whether it would have perished if its
filaments had been gently disentangled from the object to which they had
attached themselves, experienced judges of such matters may perhaps
question. To justify Clement in his estimate of the danger of such an
experiment, we must remember that to young people in their teens a first
passion is a portentous and unprecedented phenomenon. The young man may
have been mistaken in thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and
may have done more than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it
was the mistake of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another's
feelings by his own. He measured the depth of his own rather by what he
felt they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.

Clement was called a "genius" by those who knew him, and was consequently
in danger of being spoiled