nger a man, I was a living hymn of praise, prayer, adoration,
worship of overflowing, speechless thankfulness. I felt an intoxication
of the heart, a madness of the soul; my body had lost the consciousness
of its materiality and I no longer believed in time, or space, or
death. The new life of love which had gushed forth in my heart gave me
the consciousness, the anticipated enjoyment, of the fulness of
immortality.

XVIII.

I was made aware of the flight of time by seeing the meridian sun
striking on the summit of the Abbey walls. I came down the hill through
the woods bounding from rock to rock, and from tree to tree. My heart
beat as though it would burst. As I approached the little inn, I saw
the stranger in a sloping meadow behind the house. She was seated at
the foot of a sunny wall, against which the inhabitants of the place
had piled a few stones. Her white dress shone out on the verdant
meadow, and the shade of a haystack screened her face from the sun. She
was reading in a little book that lay open on her lap, and every now
and then interrupted her reading to play with the children from the
mountain, who came to offer her flowers, or chestnuts. On seeing me,
she attempted to rise as if to meet me half-way, and her gesture was
quite sufficient to encourage me to approach. She received me with a
blushing look and tremulous lip, which I perceived, and which increased
my own bashfulness. The strangeness of our situation was so
embarrassing, that we remained some time without finding a word to say
to each other. At last, with a timid and scarcely intelligible gesture,
she motioned to me to sit down on the hay, not far from her; it seemed
to me that she has expected me, and had kept a place for me. I sat down
respectfully at some distance. Our silence remained unbroken, and it
was evident that we were both ineffectually seeking to exchange some of
those commonplace phrases which may be called the base coin of
conversation, and serve to conceal thoughts instead of revealing them.
Fearing to say too much or too little, we gave no utterance to what was
in our hearts; we remained mute, and our silence increased our
embarrassment. At length, our downcast eyes were raised at the same
moment and met; I saw such depth of sensibility in hers, and she read
in mine so much suppressed rapture, truth, and deep feeling, that we
could no longer take them off each other's face, and tears rising to
our eyes, at the same in