_Mait_. I know not how it was, but as I wandered slowly down the shady road, for the first time in years of worldliness, the dream that had haunted my boyhood revived again. Do you know what I mean, Andre?--that dim yearning for lovelier beings and fairer places, whose ideals lie in the heaven-fitted mind, but not in the wilderness it wakes in; that mystery of our nature, that overlooked as it is, and trampled with unmeaning things so soon, hides, after all, the whole secret of this life's dark enigma. _Andre_. But see,--our time is well-nigh gone,--this is philosophy--I would have heard a love tale. _Mait_. It was then, that near me, suddenly I heard the voice that made this dull, real world, thenceforth a richer place for me than the gorgeous dream-land of childhood was of old. _Andre_. Ay, ay--go on. _Mait_. Andre, did you ever meet an eye, in which the intelligence of our nature idealized, as it were, the very poetry of human thought seemed to look forth? _Andre_. One such. _Mait_.--That reflected your whole being; nay, revealed from its mysterious depths, new consciousness, that yet seemed like a faint memory, the traces of some old and pleasant dream? _Andre_. Methinks the heavenly revelation itself doth that. _Mait_. Such an eye I saw then shining on me. A clump of stately pines grew on the sloping road-side, and, looking into its dark embrasure, I beheld a group of merry children around a spring that gurgled out of the hillside there, and among them, there sat a young girl clad in white, her hat on the bank beside her, tying a wreath of wild flowers. That was all--that was all, Andre. _Andre_. Well, she was beautiful, I suppose? Nay, if it was the damsel I met just now I need not ask. _Mait_. Beautiful? Ay, they called her so. _Beauty_ I had seen before; but from that hour the sun shone with another light, and the very dust and stones of this dull earth were precious to me. _Beautiful?_ Nay, it was _she_. I knew her in an instant, the spirit of my being; she whose existence made the lovely whole, of which mine alone had been the worthless and despised fragment. There are a thousand women on the earth the artist might call as lovely,--show me another that I can worship. _Andre_. Worship! This is Captain Everard Maitland. If I should shut my eyes now---- _Mait_. Well, go on; but I tell you, ne'ertheless, there have been times, even in this very spot,--we often wandered here when the day was dying as it is now,--here in her soft, breathing loveliness, she has stood beside me, when I have,--_worshipped?_--nay, feared her, in her holy beauty, as we two should an angel who should come through that glade to us now. _Andre_. True it is, something of the Divinity there is in beauty, that, in its intenser forms, repels with all its winningness, until the lowliness of love looks through it. Well--you worshipped her.