have jarred harshly and irreverently
with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah's
and her brother's life. Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often
chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she
was singing them.

Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful
while she sat by him. A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing,
like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having
drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The
same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
as lenient as it may.

Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it
necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the
reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
were as powerful a ch