ure.

The temperature of the mountain-air was just such as to invite us to
never enter doors except to eat and sleep; and breakfasting at
convent-hours, we passed the long day in rambling up the ravines and
through the sombre forests, drawing, botanizing, and conversing in
group around some spot of exquisite natural beauty; and all of the
party, myself excepted, supposing it to be the un-dissenting, common
desire to contrive opportunity for the love-making of Palgray and
Stephania. And, bitter though it was, in each particular instance, to
accept a hint from one and another, and stroll off, leaving the
confessed lovers alone by some musical water-fall, or in the secluded
and twilight dimness of some curve in an overhanging ravine--places
where only to breathe is to love--I still felt an instinctive
prompting to rather anticipate than wait for these reminders, she
alone knowing what it cost me to be without her in that delicious
wilderness; and Palgray, as well as I could judge, having a mind out
of harmony with both the wilderness and her.

He loved her--loved her as well as most women need to be, or know that
they can be loved. But he was too happy, too prosperous, too
universally beloved, to love well. He was a man, with all his beauty,
more likely to be fascinating to his own sex than to hers, for the
women who love best, do not love in the character they live in; and
his out-of-doors heart, whose joyfulness was so contagious, and whose
bold impulses were so manly and open, contented itself with gay
homage, and left unplummeted the sweetest as well as deepest wells of
the thoughtful tenderness of woman.

To most observers, Stephania Wangrave would have seemed only born to
be gay--the mere habit of being happy having made its life-long
imprint upon her expression of countenance, and all of her nature,
that would be legible to a superficial reader, being brought out by
the warm translucence of her smiles. But while I had seen this, in the
first hour of my study of her, I was too advanced in my knowledge (of
such works of nature as encroach on the models of Heaven) not to know
this to be a light veil over a picture of melancholy meaning. Sadness
was the tone of her mind's inner coloring. Tears were the
subterranean river upon which her soul's bark floated with the most
loved freight of her thought's accumulation--the sunny waters of joy,
where alone she was thought to voyage, being the tide on which her
heart embark