his roof,
she would, on coming of age, either have lived altogether with her aunt,
or have set up an establishment of her own. As it was, the rector had
secured his five hundred a year, on terms acceptable to both sides--and,
more than that, he had got her safe under his own eye. For, remark, there
was one terrible possibility threatening him in the future--the
possibility of Lucilla's marriage!

Such was the strange domestic position of this interesting creature, at
the time when I entered the house.

You will now understand how completely puzzled I was when I recalled what
had happened on the evening of my arrival, and when I asked myself--in
the matter of the mysterious stranger--what course I was to take next. I
had found Lucilla a solitary being--helplessly dependent in her blindness
on others--and, in that sad condition, without a mother, without a
sister, without a friend even in whose sympathies she could take refuge,
in whose advice she could trust. I had produced a first favorable
impression on her; I had won her liking at once, as she had won mine. I
had accompanied her on an evening walk, innocent of all suspicion of what
was going on in her mind. I had by pure accident enabled a stranger to
intensify the imaginary interest which she felt in him, by provoking him
to speak in her hearing for the first time. In a moment of hysterical
agitation--and in sheer despair of knowing who else to confide in--the
poor, foolish, blind, lonely girl had opened her heart to me. What was I
to do?

If the case had been an ordinary one, the whole affair would have been
simply ridiculous.

But the case of Lucilla was not the case of girls in general.

The minds of the blind are, by cruel necessity, forced inward on
themselves. They live apart from us--ah, how hopelessly far apart!--in
their own dark sphere, of which we know nothing. What relief could come
to Lucilla from the world outside? None! It was part of her desolate
liberty to be free to dwell unremittingly on the ideal creature of her
own dream. Within the narrow limit of the one impression that it had been
possible for her to derive of this man--the impression of the beauty of
his voice--her fancy was left to work unrestrained in the changeless
darkness of her life. What a picture! I shudder as I draw it. Oh, yes, it
is easy, I know, to look at it the other way--to laugh at the folly of a
girl, who first excites her imagination about a total stranger; and then,