nly what they show me. Even my imagination can
picture to me only what my senses can paint."

"Your senses!" cried Otho, contemptuously,--"it is very true, as you
confess, you are limited by your senses. Is all this beauty around you
created merely for you--and the other insects about us? I have no doubt
it is filled with invisible life."

"Do let us go in!" said Celia. "This talk, just at twilight, under
the shade of this shrubbery, makes me shudder. I am not afraid of the
fairies. I never could read fairy stories when I was a child; they were
tiresome to me. But talking in this way makes one timid. There might be
strollers or thieves under all these hedges."

They went into the house, through the hall, and different apartments,
till they reached the drawing-room. Isabella stood transfixed upon the
threshold. It was all so familiar to her!--everything as she had known
it before! Over the mantelpiece hung the picture of the scornful Spanish
lady; a heavy bookcase stood in one corner; comfortable chairs and
couches were scattered round the room; beautiful landscapes against the
wall seemed like windows cut into foreign scenery. There was an air of
ease in the room, an old-fashioned sort of ease, such as the Fogertys
must have loved.

"It is a pretty room, is it not?" said Lawrence. "You look at it as if
it pleased you. How much more comfort there is about it than in the
fashionable parlors of the day! It is solid, substantial comfort."

"You look at it as if you had seen it before," said Otho to Isabella.
"Do you know the room impressed me in that way, too?"

"It is singular," said Lawrence, "the feeling, that 'all this has been
before,' that comes over one at times. I have heard it expressed by a
great many people."

"Have you, indeed, ever had this feeling?" asked Isabella.

"Certainly," replied Lawrence; "I say to myself sometimes, 'I have been
through all this before!' and I can almost go on to tell what is to come
next,--it seems so much a part of my past experience."

"It is strange it should be so with you,--and with you too," she said,
turning to Otho.

"Perhaps we are all more alike than we have thought," said Otho.

Otho's mother appeared, and the conversation took another turn.

Isabella did not go to the Willows again, until all the Lester family
were summoned there to a large party that Mrs. Blanchard gave. She
called it a house-warming, although she had been in the house some time.
It was a be