d inscrutable. At present, however, to her
considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to
scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and
wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in
that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly
near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a
Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there
so hung about it the vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter,
and even, verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an
interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying
with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite
as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain
plates. She had knocked, in short--though she could scarce have said
whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool
smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had
happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had
come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her
approach had been noted.

If this image, however, may represent our young woman's consciousness of
a recent change in her life--a change now but a few days old--it must
at the same time be observed that she both sought and found in renewed
circulation, as I have called it, a measure of relief from the idea
of having perhaps to answer for what she had done. The pagoda in her
blooming garden figured the arrangement--how otherwise was it to be
named?--by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry without
breaking, as she liked to put it, with the past. She had surrendered
herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition,
and yet she had not, all the while, given up her father--the least
little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing the two men
beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage had marked
it as more happy than this fact of its having practically given the
elder, the lonelier, a new friend. What had moreover all the while
enriched the whole aspect of success was that the latter's marriage had
been no more meassurably paid for than her own. His having taken the
same great step in the same free way had not in the least involved the
relegation of his daughter. That it was remarkable they should have
been able at once so to s