the future
than he had latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb
new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And
this seaside notion--why, that was best of all.

His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes
upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn
with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their
beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in
mind's eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather
pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and
revivified would she have become, by the time he went down to the depot
to meet her on her return.

For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside.
It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm,
alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books,
and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated
themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon
it, expanded to embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the
thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion
with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental
stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and
artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his
revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights
modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.

He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house. His walk had brought
him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which
yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the
hillside. Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in
factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon
the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting
an oddly incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of
the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground,
stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through
which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences
of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west,
nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from
the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazin