nced, as if he suppressed some quick repartee; but,
drooping his long lashes deferentially, he said, in gentle tones, "I
should like to know what so beautiful a young lady considers the great
object of life."

Mary answered reverentially, in those words then familiar from infancy
to every Puritan child, "To glorify God, and enjoy Him forever."

"_Really?_" he said, looking straight into her eyes with that
penetrating glance with which he was accustomed to take the gauge of
every one with whom he conversed.

"Is it _not_?" said Mary, looking back, calm and firm, into the
sparkling, restless depths of his eyes.

At that moment, two souls, going with the whole force of their being in
opposite directions, looked out of their windows at each other with a
fixed and earnest recognition.

Burr was practised in every art of gallantry,--he had made womankind
a study,--he never saw a beautiful face and form without a sort of
restless desire to experiment upon it and try his power over the
interior inhabitant; but, just at this moment, something streamed into
his soul from those blue, earnest eyes, which brought back to his mind
what pious people had so often told him of his mother, the beautiful
and early-sainted Esther Burr. He was one of those persons who
systematically managed and played upon himself and others, as a skilful
musician, on an instrument. Yet one secret of his fascination was the
_naivete_ with which, at certain moments, he would abandon himself to
some little impulse of a nature originally sensitive and tender. Had the
strain of feeling which now awoke in him come over him elsewhere, he
would have shut down some spring in his mind, and excluded it in a
moment; but, talking with a beautiful creature whom he wished to please,
he gave way at once to the emotion:--real tears stood in his fine eyes,
and he raised Mary's hand to his lips, and kissed it, saying--

"Thank you, my beautiful child, for so good a thought. It is truly a
noble sentiment, though practicable only to those gifted with angelic
natures."

"Oh, I trust not," said Mary, earnestly touched and wrought upon, more
than she herself knew, by the beautiful eyes, the modulated voice, the
charm of manner, which seemed to enfold her like an Italian summer.

Burr sighed,--a real sigh of his better nature, but passed out with all
the more freedom that he felt it would interest his fair companion, who,
for the time being, was the one woman of the world