ening in the exercise of the dance, which the
gravity of my profession rather than my years forbade to join; and her
laugh, so musically subdued, ravishing my ear and fretting my heart
as if the laugh were a mockery on my sombre self and my presumptuous
dreams. But no, suddenly, shyly, her eyes would steal away from those
about her, steal to the corner in which I sat, as if they missed me,
and, meeting my own gaze, their light softened before they turned away;
and the colour on her cheek would deepen, and to her lip there came a
smile different from the smile that it shed on others. And then--and
then--all jealousy, all sadness vanished, and I felt the glory which
blends with the growing belief that we are loved.

In that diviner epoch of man's mysterious passion, when ideas of
perfection and purity, vague and fugitive before, start forth and
concentre themselves round one virgin shape,--that rises out from the
sea of creation, welcomed by the Hours and adorned by the Graces,--how
the thought that this archetype of sweetness and beauty singles himself
from the millions, singles himself for her choice, ennobles and lifts
up his being! Though after-experience may rebuke the mortal's illusion,
that mistook for a daughter of Heaven a creature of clay like himself,
yet for a while the illusion has grandeur. Though it comes from the
senses which shall later oppress and profane it, the senses at first
shrink into shade, awed and hushed by the presence that charms them. All
that is brightest and best in the man has soared up like long-dormant
instincts of Heaven, to greet and to hallow what to him seems life's
fairest dream of the heavenly! Take the wings from the image of Love,
and the god disappears from the form!

Thus, if at moments jealous doubt made my torture, so the moment's
relief from it sufficed for my rapture. But I had a cause for disquiet
less acute but less varying than jealousy.

Despite Lilian's recovery from the special illness which had more
immediately absorbed my care, I remained perplexed as to its cause
and true nature. To her mother I gave it the convenient epithet of
"nervous;" but the epithet did not explain to myself all the symptoms I
classified by it. There was still, at times, when no cause was apparent
or conjecturable, a sudden change in the expression of her countenance,
in the beat of her pulse; the eye would become fixed, the bloom would
vanish, the pulse would sink feebler and feebler till