h while he was awake.

With Gnulemah, Nurse's intercourse became yearly more and more
infrequent. As the child arose to womanhood, she grew apart from the
voiceless creature who had cared for her infancy. It was not
Gnulemah's fault, whose heart was never barren of loving impulses.
But mother, father, were words whose meaning she had never been
taught; and had Nurse comprehended the unconscious thirst and hunger
of the girl's soul,--unconscious, but not therefore harmless,--she
might have tried, by dint of affectionate observances and
companionship, to represent the motherly office which she had filled
in the beginning. But this was not to be. Some hidden agency had
forced the two ever farther asunder. Moreover, Gnulemah developed
rapidly, while Nurse underwent a process of gradual congealment,--her
wits and emotions became torpid. Besides this, she was the victim of
disfigurement, physical as well as spiritual; while Gnulemah, both
naturally and by training, was sensitive to beauty and ugliness. Other
surface causes no doubt there were, in addition to the hidden one,
which was perhaps the most potent of all.

A considerable time had passed since Gnulemah's departure, when Balder
became aware that he was not alone in the conservatory. His thoughts
were all of Gnulemah, and he looked quickly round in expectation of
seeing her. The apparition of a widely different object startled him
to his feet.

A female figure stood before him, wrapped in sad-colored garments of
anomalous description, her head tied up in dark turban-like folds of
cloth. A lock of rusty black hair escaped from beneath this head-dress
and hung down beside her face. She might once have been tall and
erect, but her form now sagged to the left, losing both height and
dignity. Her visage, seamed and furrowed by the scar of some terrible
calamity, had lost its natural contour. The left eye was extinguished,
but the right remained,--the only feature in its original state. It
was dark and bright, and possessed, by very virtue of its disfigured
environment, a repulsive kind of beauty. Its influence was peculiar.
In itself, it postulated an owner in the prime of life, handsome and
graceful. But, one's attention wandering, the woman's actual ugliness
impressed itself with an intensity enhanced by the imaginary contrast.

A grotesque analogy was thus brought to light. The woman was dual. Her
right side lived; the left--blind, inert, and soulless--was dragged
a