here are many of us who may be able, from parallel
instances of infirmity, to enter into that state of mind, which led her at
least to procrastinate what she might do any minute. However, now left
absolutely to herself, Aristo gone, and the answer of the government to
the magistracy not having yet come, she recurred to the parchment, and to
the Bishop's words, which ran, "Here you will see who it is we love," or
language to that effect. It was tightly lodged under her girdle, and so
had escaped in the confusion of that terrible evening. She opened it at
length and read.

It was the writing of a provincial Greek; elegant, however, and marked
with that simplicity which was to her taste the elementary idea of a
classic author. It was addressed to one Theophilus, and professed to be a
carefully digested and verified account of events which had been already
attempted by others. She read a few paragraphs, and became interested, and
in no long time she was absorbed in the volume. When she had once taken it
up, she did not lay it down. Even at other times she would have prized it,
but now, when she was so desolate and lonely, it was simply a gift from an
unseen world. It opened a view of a new state and community of beings,
which only seemed too beautiful to be possible. But not into a new state
of things alone, but into the presence of One who was simply distinct and
removed from anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever
depicted to her mind as ideal perfection. Here was that to which her
intellect tended, though that intellect could not frame it. It could
approve and acknowledge, when set before it, what it could not originate.
Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience; whose Voice she heard,
whose Person she was seeking for. Here was He who kindled a warmth on the
cheek of both Chione and Agellius. That image sank deep into her; she felt
it to be a reality. She said to herself, "This is no poet's dream; it is
the delineation of a real individual. There is too much truth and nature,
and life and exactness about it, to be anything else." Yet she shrank from
it; it made her feel her own difference from it, and a feeling of
humiliation came upon her mind, such as she never had had before. She
began to despise herself more thoroughly day by day; yet she recollected
various passages in the history which reassured her amid her
self-abasement, especially that of His tenderness and love for the poor
girl at the