Among the waltzings, and the droppings, and the swarmings of the sounds, Pierre now heard the tones above deftly stealing and winding among the myriad serpentinings of the other melody:--deftly stealing and winding as respected the instrumental sounds, but in themselves wonderfully and abandonedly free and bold--bounding and rebounding as from multitudinous reciprocal walls; while with every syllable the hair-shrouded form of Isabel swayed to and fro with a like abandonment, and suddenness, and wantonness:--then it seemed not like any song; seemed not issuing from any mouth; but it came forth from beneath the same vail concealing the guitar. Now a strange wild heat burned upon his brow; he put his hand to it. Instantly the music changed; and drooped and changed; and changed and changed; and lingeringly retreated as it changed; and at last was wholly gone. Pierre was the first to break the silence. "Isabel, thou hast filled me with such wonderings; I am so distraught with thee, that the particular things I had to tell to thee, when I hither came; these things I can not now recall, to speak them to thee:--I feel that something is still unsaid by thee, which at some other time thou wilt reveal. But now I can stay no longer with thee. Know me eternally as thy loving, revering, and most marveling brother, who will never desert thee, Isabel. Now let me kiss thee and depart, till to-morrow night; when I shall open to thee all my mind, and all my plans concerning me and thee. Let me kiss thee, and adieu!" As full of unquestioning and unfaltering faith in him, the girl sat motionless and heard him out. Then silently rose, and turned her boundlessly confiding brow to him. He kissed it thrice, and without another syllable left the place. BOOK VII. INTERMEDIATE BETWEEN PIERRE'S TWO INTERVIEWS WITH ISABEL AT THE FARM-HOUSE. I. Not immediately, not for a long time, could Pierre fully, or by any approximation, realize the scene which he had just departed. But the vague revelation was now in him, that the visible world, some of which before had seemed but too common and prosaic to him; and but too intelligible; he now vaguely felt, that all the world, and every misconceivedly common and prosaic thing in it, was steeped a million fathoms in a mysteriousness wholly hopeless of solution. First, the enigmatical story of the girl, and the profound sincerity of it, and yet the ever accompanying haziness, obscurity, and almost miraculousness of it;--first, this wonderful story of the girl had displaced all commonness and prosaicness from his soul; and then, the inexplicable spell of the guitar, and the subtleness of the melodious appealings of the few brief words from Isabel sung in the conclusion of the melody--all this had bewitched him, and enchanted him, till he had sat motionless and bending over, as a tree-transformed and mystery-laden visitant, caught and fast bound in some necromancer's garden.