to smother none of the fires which had
been enkindled by a bountiful nature within her soul.

"While I was reasoning thus, she made me another mock courtesy, and
explaining her presence by saying she was a cousin of Miss Dudleigh's,
ventured to remark that, if Master Felt would be kind enough to state
his errand, she would be glad to carry it to Miss Dudleigh. I answered
confusedly, but with a fervor she could not fail to understand, and
following up this effort by another, led her into a conversation in
which my responses gradually became such as she should expect from a
gentleman and an equal.

"For with her, notwithstanding her beauty, and the sense of splendor and
luxury which breathed from her mysterious presence, I never felt that
sense of personal inferiority I experienced at first with Miss Dudleigh.
Whether I recognized then, as now, the lack of those high qualities
which lift one mortal above another, I do not know. I am only certain
that, while I regarded her as a woman to be obeyed, to be loved, to be
followed through life, through death, into whatsoever regions of horror,
danger, and pain she might lead me, I never looked upon her as a being
out of my world or beyond my reach, except so far as her caprice might
carry her.

"It was therefore with the fixed determination to force from her some of
the interest she had awakened in me, that I grasped at this first
opportunity of conversation; and in spite of her unrest--she did not
want to linger--held her to the spot till I had made her feel that a man
had come into her life whose will meant something, and to whom, if she
did not subdue the light of her glances, she must give account for every
added throb she caused to beat in his proud heart.

"This done I let her go, for Miss Dudleigh was not well and needed her,
and the door closed behind her mysterious smile, and the sound of her
steps died out in the hall, and in fancy only could I behold her supple,
dark-clad form go up the broad staircase, projecting itself now against
the golden daylight falling through one window, and now against the
clustering vines that screened another, till she disappeared in regions
of which I knew nothing and whither even my daring imagination presumed
not to follow. And the vision never left my eyes nor her form my heart,
and I went out in my turn, a burning, eager, determined man, where in a
short half hour before I had entered cold and self-satisfied, without
hope and wit