tempt a gypsy to evil tellings. I could think of
it as a history written in a line: Carinthia, Saint and Martyr! As for
comparisons, they are flowers thrown 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
l