Consider for an instant what an elaboration of culture the passion of love may have reached in this child. She can invest the man whom she has accepted as monarch of her soul with the perfections of the heroes of history and of fiction. She can prophesy for him a future which a hundred years since was not realizable upon this continent. Out of her own mind she can draw shining raiment of success for him which shall be visible across oceans, and crowns of fame which shall not be dimmed by centuries. She can love him for superhuman loveliness which she has power to impute to him, and for victories which she is magician enough to strew in anticipation beneath his feet. It is not extravagance, it is even nothing but the simplest and most obvious truth, to say that there have been periods in the world’s history, without going back to the cycles of the troglodyte and the lake-dweller, when such love would have been beyond the capabilities of humanity. It must be understood, by the way, that Bessie was not bred amid the sparse, hard-worked, and scantily cultured population of Barham, and that, until the death of her parents, two years before the opening of this story, she had been a plant of the stimulating, hot-bed life of a city. Into this bucolic land she had brought susceptibilities which do not often exist there, and a craving for excitements of sentiment which does not often find gratification there. Consequently the first youth who in any wise resembled the ideal of manhood which she had set up in her soul found her ready to fall into his grasp, to believe in him as in a deity, and to look to him for miracles of love and happiness. Well, these two interesting idiots, as the unsympathizing observer might call them, have turned their backs on the precipice and are walking toward the girl’s home. They had not gone far before Bessie uttered a speech which excited Harry’s profound amazement, and which will probably astonish every young man who has not as yet made his conquests. After looking at him long and steadfastly, she said: “How is it possible that you can care for me? I don’t see what you find in me to make me worthy of your admiration.” How often such sentiments have been felt, and how often also they have been spoken, by beings whose hearts have been bowed by the humility of strong affection! Perhaps women are less likely to give them speech than men; but it is only because they are more trammelled by an education of reserve, and by inborn delicacy and timidity; it is not because they feel them less. This girl, however, was so frank in nature, and so earnest and eager in her feelings, that she could not but give forth the aroma of loving meekness that was in her soul. “What do you mean?” asked Foster, in his innocent surprise. “See nothing to admire in _you_!”