ave filled it,
there, which would travel but slowly, against the wind, towards our
Northeastern metropolis, and perhaps melt into thin air before reaching
it.

There was not--and I distinctly repeat it--the slightest foundation in
my knowledge for any surmise of the kind. But there is a species of
intuition,--either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a
fact,--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.
The soul gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when a
vegetable diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood. Vapors
then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood,
but sometimes truth. The spheres of our companions have, at such
periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when robust
health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy. Zenobia's
sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed
me, during this period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical
clairvoyant.

Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment
(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost
perfection of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was not
exactly maiden-like. What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did? What
girl had ever spoken in her mellow tones? Her unconstrained and
inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman
to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery. Yet sometimes I
strove to be ashamed of these conjectures. I acknowledged it as a
masculine grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is
often guilty towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet, liberal,
but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition. Still, it
was of no avail to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.
Pertinaciously the thought, "Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived and
loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly
developed rose!"--irresistibly that thought drove out all other
conclusions, as often as my mind reverted to the subject.

Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of the
point to which it led me.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while
she arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great
deal of eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but never,
I think, to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of favoring