already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed in
with the fragrant air, or taken with her food. She fancied,
likewise--but it might be altogether fancy--that there was a stirring up
of her system: a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her
veins, and tingling, half-painfully, half-pleasurably, at her heart.
Still, whenever she dared to look into the mirror, there she beheld
herself, pale as a white rose, and with the crimson birth-mark stamped
upon her cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so much as she.

To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary
to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana turned
over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old tomes, she
met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the works of the
philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus, Magnus, Cornelius
Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic
Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their
centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore
were believed, and perhaps imagined themselves, to have acquired from
the investigation of nature a power above nature, and from physics a
sway over the spiritual world. Hardly less curious and imaginative were
the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the
members, knowing little of the limits of natural possibility, were
continually recording wonders, or proposing methods whereby wonders
might be wrought.

But, to Georgiana, the most engrossing volume was a large folio from her
husband's own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of his
scientific career, with its original aim, the methods adopted for its
development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances to
which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both the
history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical
and laborious, life. He handled physical details, as if there were
nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed himself
from materialism, by his strong and eager aspiration towards the
infinite. In his grasp, the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul.
Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer, and loved him more profoundly
than ever, but with a less entire dependence on his judgment than
heretofore. Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe that
his most spl