ars seldom fell from her
eyes, complaints never;--but her interest was aroused by no temporal
matter; she seemed, in her thoughts and her desires, as far removed as a
spirit from the influences of the external world.

This state of being no person who lives by bread alone could have
understood, or endured patiently, in one with whom in the affairs of
daily life he was associated.

The Revelator was an exile in Patmos.

Dame Briton was convinced that Clarice was losing her wits. Bondo Emmins
yielded to the force of some inexplicable law, and found her fairer
day by day. To his view, she was like a vision moving through a dream,
rather than like any actual woman; and though the drift of the vision
seemed not towards him, he was more anxious to compel it than to
accomplish any other purpose ever entertained. The actual nearness,
the apparent unattainableness, of that he coveted, excited in him such
desires of conquest and possession as he would seek to appease in
one way alone. To win her would have been to the mind of any other
inhabitant of Diver's Bay a feat as impracticable as the capture of the
noble ghost of Hamlet's father, as he stands exorcized by Mrs. Kemble.

And yet, while her sorrow made her the pity and the wonder of the
people, it did not keep her sacred from the reach of gossip. Observing
the frequency with which Bondo Emmins visited Old Briton's cabin, it was
profanely said by some that the pale girl would ere long avert her eyes
from the dead and fix them on the living.

Emmins had frequent opportunities for making manifest his good-will
towards the family of Briton. The old man fell on the ice one day and
broke his thigh, and was constrained to lie in bed for many a day, and
to walk with the help of crutches when he rose again. Then was the
young man's time to serve him like a son. He brought a surgeon from
the Port,--and the inefficiency of the man was not his fault, surely.
Through tedious days and nights Emmins sat by the old man's bedside,
soothing pain, enlivening weariness, endeavoring to banish the gloomy
elements that combined to make the cabin the abode of darkness. He would
have his own way, and no one could prevent him. When Old Briton's money
failed, his supplies did not. Even Clarice was compelled to accept his
service thankfully, and to acknowledge that she knew not how they could
have managed without him in this strait.

The accident, unfortunate as it might be deemed, nevertheless e