r.

As he went downstairs the door of the sitting-room stood open, and he
looked in. Ida sat there reading.

The weather was very warm, and her dress was some gauzy stuff of a
pale-green tint which set off her yellow hair and bare arms and throat
with sumptuous effect. She was a ravishing symphony in white, pale green,
and gold.

She had not heard his approach, and was unconscious of his gaze. As he
thought of her as the woman who might be his wife, he grew so faint with
love, so intimidated with a sense of his presumption in hoping to possess
this glorious creature, that, not daring to enter, he fled out into the
darkness to compose himself.

No experience of miscellaneous flirtations, or more or less innocent
dalliance, had ever weakened the witchery of woman's charms to him, or
dulled the keenness of his sensibility to the heaven she can bestow. For
an hour he wandered about the dark and silent village street, waiting for
the tumult of his emotions to subside sufficiently to leave him in some
degree master of himself. When at last he returned to the house, his
nerves strung with the resolution to put his fortune to the test, Ida was
still in the sitting-room where he had left her.

Miss Ludington's conversation with Paul had left her in a mood
scarcely less agitated than his. The sensation with which she had
watched his devotion to Ida during the past weeks had been a sort of
double-consciousness as if it were herself whom Paul was wooing, although
at the same time she was a spectator. The thoughts and emotions which she
ascribed to Ida agitated her almost as if they had been experienced in
her proper person.

It was a fancy of hers that between herself and Ida there existed a
species of clairvoyance, which enabled her to know what was passing in
the latter's mind--a completeness of rapport never realized between any
other two minds, but nothing more than might be expected to attend such a
relationship as theirs, being a foretaste of the tie that joins the
several souls of an individual in heaven. She had never had a serious
love affair in her life, but now, in her old age, she was passing through
a genuine experience of the tender passion through her sympathetic
identification with Ida.

As she sat in her chamber after Paul had gone, fancying herself in Ida's
place, imagining what she would hear him say, what would be her feelings,
and what she would answer, her cheeks flushed, her breath came quickly,
and