nd, as he thought of her in his restless tossings, she seemed to him
something as pure, as wholesome, and strong as the air of his native
New-England hills, as the sweet-brier and sweet-fern he used to love
to gather when he was a boy. She seemed of a piece with all the good
old ways of New England,--its household virtues, its conscientious
sense of right, its exact moral boundaries; and he felt somehow as if
she belonged, to that healthy portion of his life which he now looked
back upon with something of regret.

Then, what would she think of him? They had been friends, he said to
himself; they had passed over those boundaries of teasing unreality
where most yoking gentlemen and young ladies are content to hold
converse with each other, and had talked together reasonably and
seriously, saying in some hours what they really thought and felt.
And Rose had impressed him at times by her silence and reticence
in certain connections, and on certain subjects, with a sense of
something hidden and veiled,--a reserved force that he longed still
further to penetrate. But now, he said to himself, he must have
fallen in her opinion. Why was she so cold, so almost haughty, in her
treatment of him the night before? He felt in the atmosphere around
her, and in the touch of her hand, that she was quivering like a
galvanic battery with the suppressed force of some powerful emotion;
and his own conscience dimly interpreted to him what it might be.

To say the truth, Rose was terribly aroused. And there was a great
deal in her to be aroused, for she had a strong nature; and the whole
force of womanhood in her had never received such a shock.

Whatever may be scoffingly said of the readiness of women to pull one
another down, it is certain that the highest class of them have the
feminine _esprit de corps_ immensely strong. The humiliation of
another woman seems to them their own humiliation; and man's lordly
contempt for another woman seems like contempt of themselves.

The deepest feeling roused in Rose by the scenes which she saw last
night was concern for the honor of womanhood; and her indignation at
first did not strike where we are told woman's indignation does, on
the woman, but on the man. Loving John Seymour as a brother from her
childhood, feeling in the intimacy in which they had grown up as if
their families had been one, the thoughts that had been forced upon
her of his wife the night before had struck to her heart with the