98 FAITH AND LOVE. 



seated ourselves upon one of those rounded masses of stone 



that so frequently puzzle the unlearned, and are of such 



interest to the scientific. Gilbert was the first to break 

 silence. 



" Ernest, there is that in the human mind forbidding it to 

 hold within itself a solitary secret. We are made for fellow- 

 ship with our kind, and our instincts revolt at whatever is 

 buried in silence. We are made to impart our joyfulness, 

 and to divide our burdens with others. Pardon me, dear 

 Ernest, if I confess that I seek your confidence from a neces- 

 sity of our being, rather than from a desire of sympathy. One 

 who must henceforth live above humanity should check his 

 yearnings for companionship. I must tell you the one fact of 

 my life, which for years has imparted its coloring to the rest. 



" It is now fifteen years since I first met Agnes Gordon. 

 She was then a widow of perhaps twenty-five, or she might 

 have been older, for I never thought upon the subject, any 

 more than I did upon her beauty, which must have been of a 

 high order ; but she was so free from all vanity that my mind 

 was rarely drawn to the fact ; and there is that about a nobly 

 constituted woman, that at once divests a man of sensuality 

 and makes him superior to the fascinations of mere external 

 attractiveness. There was around her a radiance of soul, a 

 balo as of an inner life, investing her with a glory. She seemed 

 to breathe of devotedness, if such a sentiment may be em- 

 bodied in a human form and dwell in the air of a human 

 movement. 



