oked_ into twenty times its
meaning by the beauty of their motion in that languid atmosphere--an
atmosphere that seemed only breathed for his embellishment and
Stephania's. Every posture he took seemed a happy and rare accident,
which a painter should have been there to see. The sunsets, the
moonlight, the chance back-ground and fore-ground, of vines and
rocks--every thing seemed in conspiracy to heighten his effect, and
make of him a faultless picture of a lover.

"Every thing," did I say? Yes, _even myself_--for my uncomely face and
form were such a foil to his beauty as a skillful artist would have
introduced to heighten it when all other art was exhausted, and every
one saw it except Stephania; and little they knew how, with
perceptions far quicker than theirs, I _felt_ their recognition of
this, in the degree of softer kindness in which they unconsciously
spoke to me. They pitied me, and without recognizing their own
thought--for it was a striking instance of the difference in the
gifts of nature--one man looking scarce possible to love, and beside
him, another, of the same age, to whose mere first-seen beauty,
without a word from his lips, any heart would seem unnatural not to
leap in passionate surrender.

We were the best of sudden friends, Palgray and I. He, like the rest,
walked only the outer vestibule of the sympathies, viewlessly
deepening and extending, hour by hour, in that frank and joyous
circle. The interlinkings of soul, which need no language, and which
go on, whether we will or no, while we talk with friends, are so
strangely unthought of by the careless and happy. He saw in me no
counter-worker to his influence. I was to him but a well-bred and
extremely plain man, who tranquilly submitted to forego all the first
prizes of life, content if I could contribute to society in its
unexcited voids, and receive in return only the freedom of its outer
intercourse, and its friendly esteem. But, oh! it was not in the same
world that he and I knew Stephania. He approached her from the world
in whose most valued excellences, beauty and wealth, he was
pre-eminently gifted--I, from the viewless world, in which I had at
least more skill and knowledge. In the month that I had known her
before he came, I had sedulously addressed myself to a character
within her, of which Palgray had not even a conjecture; and there was
but one danger of his encroachment on the ground I had gained--her
imagination might supply in