Orient had hesitated in her last sentence, wondering how she could deny herself the sympathy in her little pursuits that through this time she had received from Reymund. She had not encountered it before; it was delightful to her; perhaps it only had not taught her love because she did not know what love was. She had but little knowledge of human nature, almost none at all of her own nature: she preferred natural religion before theology, natural history, with its grandiose revolutions, before the petty struggles of warriors and diplomatists which her view was not broad enough to throw into epochs and revolutions more grandiose yet: it was Reymund who had taught her to look with kindly curiosity upon the lives of those about her, in hopes, it may be, of teaching her at last to look in upon her own. Of that she was unaware; but the interest in the flower never found before to-day, the discovery of the bird whose note had ravished the ear last sunset, the hunt up brookside and hill for a fragment of quartz that should have a mountain range and outlying spurs of amethyst crystals, or one full of imbedded beryls, the shining hexagons like drops of light filtered through seawater, or any heap of blooded garnets, a blaze of concrete color; the search into the age of the old pine-tree on the precipice; into the mountain strata, and the wonderment concerning that day of the earth’s date on which they were upheaved; the tracing out the path of some glacier with all its ancient and icy terrors overgrown by the verdant moss and turf of the moraine; the perpetual looking for the Maker’s fingers in his work,--all this, and such as this, she would miss and must resign if she forbade those recurring Saturdays. And then, on the other hand, a friend to meet with the results of work, the choice book, the week’s research, its thought, its fancy: she who had had no intimates, few friends-- Reymund did not wait for her to balance her ideas. “The train arrives,” said he, “by five o’clock,--a little before. Every Saturday, therefore, at five o’clock, I shall be in your drawing-room.” The thing was settled, then, without her. She began all at once to fear that, after all, it would not happen so; he would let other things creep between; when he was fairly at a distance from her he would be angry with her for having quite failed to feel that entire satisfaction in him, to give him that love which, in a high ideal, she believed to be due from every woman to her husband; a thousand things would hinder. “I can hardly believe it,” she said.