Nor was this all. These rides were repeated every day. Obed Chute declared that this was the best thing for her in the world, and that she must go out as often as was possible. Zillah made no objection. So the pleasure was renewed from day to day. But Windham could speak of other things than battle, and murder, and sudden death. He was deeply read in literature. He loved poetry with passionate ardor. All English poetry was familiar to him. The early English metrical romance, Chaucer, Spenser, the Elizabethan dramatists, Waller, Marvell, and Cowley, Lovelace and Suckling, were all appreciated fully. He had admiration for the poets of the Restoration; he had no words to express the adoration which he felt for Milton; Gray and Collins he knew by heart; Thomson and Cowper he could mention with appreciation; while the great school of the Revolutionary poets rivaled all the rest in the admiration which they extorted from him. Tennyson and the Brownings were, however, most in his thoughts; and as these were equally dear to Zillah, they met on common ground. What struck Zillah most was the fact that occasional stray bits, which she had seen in magazines, and had treasured in her head, were equally known, and equally loved by this man, who would repeat them to her with his full melodious voice, giving thus a new emphasis and a new meaning to words whose meaning she thought she already felt to the full. In these was a deeper meaning, as Windham said them, than she had ever known before. He himself seemed to have felt the meaning of some of these. What else could have caused that tremulous tone which, in its deep musical vibrations, made these words ring deep within her heart? Was there not a profounder meaning in the mind of this man, whose dark eyes rested upon hers with such an unfathomable depth of tenderness and sympathy--those eyes which had in them such a magnetic power that even when her head was turned away she could _feel_ them resting upon her, and knew that he was looking at her--with what deep reverence! with what unutterable longing! with what despair! Yes, despair. For on this man's face, with all the reverence and longing which it expressed, there was never any hope, there was never any look of inquiry after sympathy; it was mute reverence--silent adoration; the look that one may cast upon a divinity, content with the offer of adoration, but never dreaming of a return.