him the nobler temple of soul-worship,
which was still unbuilt, and which would never be builded except by
pangs such as he was little likely to feel in the undeepening channel
of happiness. He did not notice that _I_ never spoke to her in the
same key of voice to which the conversation of others was attuned. He
saw not that, while she turned to _him_ with a smile as a preparation
to listen, she heard _my_ voice as if her attention had been arrested
by distant music--with no change in her features except a look more
earnest. She would have called _him_ to look with her at a glowing
sunset, or to point out a new comer in the road from the village; but
if the moon had gone suddenly into a cloud and saddened the face of
the landscape, or if the wind had sounded mournfully through the
trees, as she looked out upon the night, she would have spoken of that
first to _me_.

PART III.

I am flying over the track, of what was to me a torrent--outlining its
course by alighting upon, here and there, a point where it turned or
lingered.

The reader has been to Vallambrosa--if not once as a pilgrim, at least
often with writers of travels in Italy. The usages of the convent are
familiar to all memories--their lodging of the gentlemen of a party in
cells of their own monastic privilege, and giving to the ladies less
sacred hospitalities, in a secular building of meaner and
unconsecrated architecture. (So, oh, mortifying brotherhood, you shut
off your only chance of entertaining angels unaware!)

Not permitted to eat with the ladies while on the holy mountain, Mr.
Wangrave and his secretary, and Palgray and I, fed at the table with
the aristocratic monks--(for they are the aristocrats of European
holiness, these monks of Vallambrosa.) It was somewhat a relief to me,
to be separated with my rival from the party in the feminine
refectory, even for the short space of a meal-time; for the all-day
suffering of presence with an unconscious trampler on my
heart-strings; and in circumstances where all the triumphs were his
own, were more than my intangible hold upon hope could well enable me
to bear. I was happiest, therefore, when I was out of the presence of
her to be near whom was all for which my life was worth having; and
when we sat down at the long and bare table, with the thoughtful and
ashen-cowled company, sad as I was, it was an opiate sadness--a
suspension from self-mastery, under torture which others took to be
pleas