torments of doubt concerning her fitness for himself and his
place in society; he was not sure yet that her unknown relations were
not horribly vulgar people; even yet, he was almost wholly ignorant of
the circumstances and conditions of her life. But how he saw her only in
the enrapturing light of his daring for her sake, of a self-devotion
that had seemed to make her his own; and he behaved toward her with a
lover's self-forgetfulness,--or something like it: say a perfect
tolerance, a tender patience, in which it would have been hard to detect
the lurking shadow of condescension.

He was fairly domesticated with the family. Mrs. Ellison's hurt, in
spite of her many imprudences, was decidedly better, and sometimes she
made a ceremony of being helped down from her room to dinner; but she
always had tea beside her sofa, and he with the others drank it there.
Few hours of the day passed in which they did not meet in that easy
relation which establishes itself among people sojourning in summer
idleness under the same roof. In the morning he saw the young girl fresh
and glad as any flower of the garden beneath her window, while the sweet
abstraction of her maiden dreams yet hovered in her eyes. At night he
sat with her beside the lamp whose light, illuming a little world
within, shut out the great world outside, and seemed to be the soft
effulgence of her presence, as she sewed, or knit, or read,--a heavenly
spirit of home. Sometimes he heard her talking with her cousin, or
lightly laughing after he had said good night; once, when he woke, she
seemed to be looking out of her window across the moonlight in the
Ursulines' Garden while she sang a fragment of song. To meet her on the
stairs or in the narrow entries; or to encounter her at the doors, and
make way for her to pass with a jest and blush and flutter; to sit down
at table with her three times a day,--was a potent witchery. There was a
rapture in her shawl flung over the back of a chair; her gloves, lying
light as fallen leaves on the table, and keeping the shape of her hands,
were full of winning character; and all the more unaccountably they
touched his heart because they had a certain careless, sweet shabbiness
about the finger-tips.

He found himself hanging upon her desultory talk with Fanny about the
set of things and the agreement of colors. There was always more or less
of this talk going on, whatever the main topic was, for continual
question arose in the mi