ed from the surrounding scene. One would have felt alarmed lest
this young and striking woman were about to do something eccentric. But
her beauty saved her from the worst fate that can befall a pedestrian;
people looked at her, but they did not laugh. To seek a true feeling
among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings of life, to recognize
it when found, and to accept the consequences of the discovery, draws
lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens the light of the
eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately bewildering, debasing, and
exalting, and, as Katharine speedily found, her discoveries gave her
equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense anxiety. Much depended,
as usual, upon the interpretation of the word love; which word came up
again and again, whether she considered Rodney, Denham, Mary Datchet,
or herself; and in each case it seemed to stand for something different,
and yet for something unmistakable and something not to be passed by.
For the more she looked into the confusion of lives which, instead
of running parallel, had suddenly intersected each other, the more
distinctly she seemed to convince herself that there was no other light
on them than was shed by this strange illumination, and no other path
save the one upon which it threw its beams. Her blindness in the case
of Rodney, her attempt to match his true feeling with her false feeling,
was a failure never to be sufficiently condemned; indeed, she could only
pay it the tribute of leaving it a black and naked landmark unburied by
attempt at oblivion or excuse.

With this to humiliate there was much to exalt. She thought of three
different scenes; she thought of Mary sitting upright and saying,
"I'm in love--I'm in love"; she thought of Rodney losing his
self-consciousness among the dead leaves, and speaking with the
abandonment of a child; she thought of Denham leaning upon the stone
parapet and talking to the distant sky, so that she thought him mad. Her
mind, passing from Mary to Denham, from William to Cassandra, and from
Denham to herself--if, as she rather doubted, Denham's state of mind
was connected with herself--seemed to be tracing out the lines of some
symmetrical pattern, some arrangement of life, which invested, if not
herself, at least the others, not only with interest, but with a kind
of tragic beauty. She had a fantastic picture of them upholding splendid
palaces upon their bent backs. They were the lantern-bearers, who