inst the
bars with the common result; it was the wings that suffered, the bars
only grew a trifle brighter. Then it seemed that he had lost a wife to
whom he was attached, and the child who remained to him, although he
loved her and clung to her, he did not altogether understand. So it came
about, perhaps, that he had fallen under the curses of loneliness and
continual apprehension; and in this shadow where he was doomed to walk,
flourished forebodings and regrets, drawing their strength from his
starved nature like fungi from a tree outgrown and fallen in the forest.

Mr. Fregelius, so thought Morris, was timid and reticent, because he
dared not discover his heart, that had been so sorely trampled by Fate
and Fortune. Yet he had a heart which, if he could find a confessor whom
he could trust, he longed to ease in confidence. For the rest, the man's
physical frame, not too robust at any time, was shattered, and with it
his nerve--sudden shipwreck, painful accident, the fierce alternatives
of hope and fear; then at last a delirium of joy at the recovery of one
whom he thought dead, had done their work with him; and in this broken
state some ancient, secret superstition became dominant, and, strive as
he would to suppress it, even in the presence of a stranger, had burst
from his lips in hints of unsubstantial folly.

Such was the father, or such he appeared to Morris, but of the daughter
what could be said? Without doubt she was a woman of strange and
impressive power. At this very moment her sweet voice, touched with that
continual note of pleading, still echoed in his brain. And the dark,
quiet eyes that now slept, and now shone large, as her thoughts fled
through them, like some mysterious sky at night in which the summer
lightning pulses intermittently! Who might forget those eyes that once
had seen them? Already he wished to be rid of their haunting and could
not. Then her beauty--how unusual it was, yet how rich and satisfying to
the eye and sense; in some ways almost Eastern notwithstanding her Norse
blood!

Often Morris had read or heard of the bewildering power of women, which
for his part hitherto he had been inclined to attribute to shallow and
very common causes, such as underlie all animate nature. Yet that of
Stella--for undoubtedly she had power--suggested another interpretation
to his mind. Or was it, after all, nothing but a variant, one of the
Protean shapes of the ancient, life-compelling mystery? An