fancies. She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her
eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beautiful ancestress, but
on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the
splendors of her full-blown womanhood.

* * * * *

The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving _was_ handsome, as
the glance at him already given might have foreshadowed. But his
features had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and
the sober tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had given
him a maturity beyond his years. The story was not an uncommon one. At
sixteen he had dreamed--and told his dream. At eighteen he had awoke,
and found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to his so that
its life was dependent on his own. Whether it would have perished if its
filaments had been gently disentangled from the object to which they had
attached themselves, experienced judges of such matters may perhaps
question. To justify Clement in his estimate of the danger of such an
experiment, we must remember that to young people in their teens a first
passion is a portentous and unprecedented phenomenon. The young man may
have been mistaken in thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and
may have done more than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it
was the mistake of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of
another's feelings by his own. He measured the depth of his own rather
by what he felt they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet
sounded.

Clement was called a "genius" by those who knew him, and was
consequently in danger of being spoiled early. The risk is great enough
anywhere, but greatest in a new country, where there is an almost
universal want of fixed standards of excellence.

He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a
planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work of
eye and hand. It would not have been strange if he thought he could do
everything, having gifts which were capable of various application,--and
being an American citizen. But though he was a good draughtsman, and had
made some reliefs and modelled some figures, he called himself only an
architect. He had given himself up to his art, not merely from a love of
it and talent for it, but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he
thought his country wanted a race of builders to clothe the new f