sband's absence, until his return. Mr. Dexter passed into
their private parlor, adjoining the bedroom, and remained there
until his wife had finished dressing.

"Shall we go down?" he inquired, as she came in looking so beautiful
in his eyes that the very sight of her surpassing loveliness gave
him pain. The Fiend was in his heart.

"Not now," she replied "I am still fatigued with the day's travel,
and had rather not see company at present."

She glanced from the window.

"What a sublimity there is in the ocean!" she said, with an unusual
degree of interest in her manner, when speaking to her husband. "I
can never become so familiar with its grandeur and vastness, as to
look upon its face without emotion. You remember Byron's magnificent
apostrophe?--

"'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.'"

And she repeated several of the stanzas from "Childe Harold," with
an effect that stirred her husband's feelings more profoundly than
they had ever been stirred by nature and poetry before.

"I have read and heard that splendid passage many times, but never
with the meaning and power which your voice has lent to the poet's
words," said Dexter, gazing with admiration upon his wife.

He sat down beside her, and took her hand in his. Her eyes wandered
to his face, and lingered there as if she were searching the
lineaments for a sign of something that her heart could take hold
upon and cling to. And it was even so; for she felt that she needed
strength and protection in an hour of surely coming trial. A feeble
sigh and a drooping of the eyelids attested her disappointment. And
yet as he leaned towards her she did not sit more erect, but rather
suffered her body to incline to him. He still retained her hand, and
she permitted him to toy with it, even slightly returning the
pressure he gave.

"You shall be my teacher in the love of nature." He spoke with a
glow of true feeling. "The lesson of this evening I shall never
forget. Old ocean will always wear a different aspect in my eyes."

"Nature," replied Mrs. Dexter, "is not a mere dead symbol.--It is
something more--an outbirth from loving principles--the body of a
creating soul. The sea, upon whose restless surface we are gazing, is
something more than a briny fluid, bearing ships upon its
bosom--something more than a mirror for the arching heavens--something
more than a symbol of immensity and eternity. There is a truth in
nature far deeper, more divine, and of h