One of her two fellow-servants, known technically amongst us as the 'parlour-maid,' was also, but not equally, attached to her mistress; and merely because her nature, less powerfully formed and endowed, did not allow her to entertain or to comprehend any service equally fervid of passion or of impassioned action. She, however, was good, affectionate, and worthy to be trusted. But a third there was, a nursery-maid, and therefore more naturally and more immediately standing within the confidence of her mistress--her I could not trust: her I suspected. But of that hereafter. Meantime, Hannah--she upon whom I leaned as upon a staff in all which respected her mistress, ran up-stairs, after I had spoken and received her answer, in order hastily to dress and prepare herself for going out along with me to the city. I did not ask her to be quick in her movements: I knew there was no need: and, whilst she was absent, I took up, in one of my fretful movements of nervousness, a book which was lying upon a side table: the book fell open of itself at a particular page; and in that, perhaps, there was nothing extraordinary; for it was a little portable edition of _Paradise Lost_; and the page was one which I must naturally have turned to many a time: for to Agnes I had read all the great masters of literature, especially those of modern times; so that few people knew the high classics more familiarly: and as to the passage in question, from its divine beauty I had read it aloud to her, perhaps, on fifty separate occasions. All this I mention to take away any appearance of a vulgar attempt to create omens; but still, in the very act of confessing the simple truth, and thus weakening the marvellous character of the anecdote, I must notice it as a strange instance of the '_Sortes Miltonianae_'--that precisely at such a moment as this I should find thrown in my way, should feel tempted to take up, and should open, a volume containing such a passage as the following: and observe, moreover, that although the volume, _once being taken up_, would naturally open where it had been most frequently read, there were, however, many passages which had been read _as_ frequently--or more so. The particular passage upon which I opened at this moment was that most beautiful one in which the fatal morning separation is described between Adam and his bride--that separation so pregnant with wo, which eventually proved the occasion of the mortal transgression--the last scene between our first parents at which both were innocent and both were happy--although the superior intellect already felt, and, in the slight altercation preceding this separation, had already expressed a dim misgiving of some coming change: these are the words, and in depth of pathos they have rarely been approached:--