ement how calm a thing it is to be happy. And so as the night,
in deepening, brightened, Lilian and I wandered by the starry lake.
Conscious of no evil in ourselves, how secure we felt from evil! A
few days more--a few days more, and we two should be as one! And that
thought we uttered in many forms of words, brooding over it in the long
intervals of enamoured silence.

And when we turned back to the quiet inn at which we had taken up our
abode, and her mother, with her soft face, advanced to meet us, I said
to Lilian,--

"Would that in these scenes we could fix our home for life, away and
afar from the dull town we have left behind us, with the fret of its
wearying cares and the jar of its idle babble!"

"And why not, Allen? Why not? But no, you would not be happy."

"Not be happy, and with you? Sceptic, by what reasoning do you arrive at
that ungracious conclusion?"

"The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs
action. Is it not so?"

"Where learned you that aphorism, out of place on such rosy lips?"

"I learned it in studying you," murmured Lilian, tenderly.

Here Mrs. Ashleigh joined us. For the first time I slept under the same
roof as Lilian. And I forgot that the universe contained an enigma to
solve or an enemy to fear.

CHAPTER LXI.

Twenty days--the happiest my life had ever known--thus glided on. Apart
from the charm which love bestows on the beloved, there was that in
Lilian's conversation which made her a delightful companion. Whether it
was that, in this pause from the toils of my career, my mind could
more pliantly supple itself to her graceful imagination, or that her
imagination was less vague and dreamy amidst those rural scenes, which
realized in their loveliness and grandeur its long-conceived ideals,
than it had been in the petty garden-ground neighboured by the stir and
hubbub of the busy town,--in much that I had once slighted or contemned
as the vagaries of undisciplined fancy, I now recognized the sparkle
and play of an intuitive genius, lighting up many a depth obscure to
instructed thought. It is with some characters as with the subtler and
more ethereal order of poets,--to appreciate them we must suspend the
course of artificial life; in the city we call them dreamers, on the
mountain-top we find them interpreters.

In Lilian, the sympathy with Nature was not, as in Margrave, from the
joyous sense of Nature's lavish vitality; it was refined into ex