Coverdale,
is the most troublesome offence you can offer to a woman."

"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."

She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy
finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.
The touch had a magical effect. So vivid a look of joy flushed up
beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla
had been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in her
place. This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was evidently
received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from her, whatever
the unuttered boon might be. From that instant, too, she melted in
quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element. Though always
an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme of frequent
discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth fixed. We no more
thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had been recognized as a
domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic fireside of old, before we
had ever been warmed by its blaze.

She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some little
wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and proceeded
to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape of a silk
purse. As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just such purses
before; indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their peculiar excellence,
besides the great delicacy and beauty of the manufacture, lay in the
almost impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the
aperture; although, to a practised touch, they would open as wide as
charity or prodigality might wish. I wondered if it were not a symbol
of Priscilla's own mystery.

Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired her,
our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the strong
puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made the oaken
frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us apprehensively, as if to
inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks did not betoken some
unusual mischief in the shrieking blast. She had been bred up, no
doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously sheltered court of the
city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter
down the slates of the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the
casement of her little room. The sense of vast, undefined space,
pressing from the outside