and her voice to soothe. Adam
interrupted her.

"Child, child, ye women know not what presses darkest and most bitterly
on the minds of men. You know not what it is to form out of immaterial
things some abstract but glorious object,--to worship, to serve it,
to sacrifice to it, as on an altar, youth, health, hope, life,--and
suddenly in old age to see that the idol was a phantom, a mockery, a
shadow laughing us to scorn, because we have sought to clasp it."

"Oh, yes, Father, women have known that illusion."

"What! Do they study?"

"No, Father, but they feel!"

"Feel! I comprehend thee not."

"As man's genius to him is woman's heart to her," answered Sibyll, her
dark and deep eyes suffused with tears. "Doth not the heart create,
invent? Doth it not dream? Doth it not form its idol out of air? Goeth
it not forth into the future, to prophesy to itself? And sooner or
later, in age or youth, doth it not wake at last, and see how it hath
wasted its all on follies? Yes, Father, my heart can answer, when thy
genius would complain."

"Sibyll," said Warner, roused and surprised, and gazing on her
wistfully, "time flies apace. Till this hour I have thought of thee but
as a child, an infant. Thy words disturb me now."

"Think not of them, then. Let me never add one grief to thine."

"Thou art brave and gay in thy silken sheen," said Adam, curiously
stroking down the rich, smooth stuff of Sibyll's tunic; "her grace the
duchess is generous to us. Thou art surely happy here!"

"Happy!"

"Not happy!" exclaimed Adam, almost joyfully, "wouldst thou that we were
back once more in our desolate, ruined home?"

"Yes, ob, yes!--but rather away, far away, in some quiet village, some
green nook; for the desolate, ruined home was not safe for thine old
age."

"I would we could escape, Sibyll," said Adam, earnestly, in a whisper,
and with a kind of innocent cunning in his eye, "we and the poor Eureka!
This palace is a prison-house to me. I will speak to the Lord Hastings,
a man of great excellence, and gentle too. He is ever kind to us."

"No, no, Father, not to him," cried Sibyll, turning pale,--"let him not
know a word of what we would propose, nor whither we would fly."

"Child, he loves me, or why does he seek me so often, and sit and talk
not?"

Sibyll pressed her clasped hands tightly to her bosom, but made no
answer; and while she was summoning courage to say something that seemed
to oppress her thoughts with intoler