into the fire.'

'I have had that--I have thought that,' said Lord Fleetwood. 'Go on;
talk of her, pray; without comparisons. I detest them. How did you meet
her? What made you part? Where is she now? I have no wish to find her,
but I want thoroughly to believe in her.'

Another than Woodseer would have perceived the young lord's malady. Here
was one bitten by the serpent of love, and athirst for an image of the
sex to serve for the cooling herb, as youth will be. Woodseer put it
down to a curious imaginative fellowship with himself. He forgot the
lord, and supposed he had found his own likeness, less gifted in speech.
After talking of Carinthia more and more in the abstract, he fell upon
his discovery of the Great Secret of life, against which his hearer
struggled for a time, though that was cooling to him too; but ultimately
there was no resistance, and so deep did they sink into the idea of pure
contemplation, that the idea of woman seemed to have become a part of
it. No stronger proof of their aethereal conversational earnestness
could be offered. A locality was given to the Great Secret, and of
course it was the place where the most powerful recent impression had
been stamped on the mind of the discoverer: the shadowy valley rolling
from the slate-rock. Woodseer was too artistic a dreamer to present the
passing vision of Carinthia with any associates there. She passed: the
solitude accepted her and lost her; and it was the richer for the one
swift gleam: she brought no trouble, she left no regrets; she was the
ghost of the rocky obscurity. But now remembering her mountain carol, he
chanced to speak of her as a girl.

'She is a girl?' cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution
of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl;
for, rapid as he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his
conception of Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman--logically.
Who but the woman could look the Gorgon! He tried to explain it to be
impossible for a girl to wear the look: and his notion evidently was,
that it had come upon a beautiful face in some staring horror of a
world that had bitten the tender woman. She touched him sympathetically
through the pathos.

Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary. Who but a girl could
look the beautiful Gorgon! What other could seem an emanation of the
mountain solitude? A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to
destroy it. Hers wou