It was this very phase of his intellectual life which had drawn the two friends so intimately together. Happy at being alive, in the flower of her spring-time, expanding to the light of life,--a harp thrilling with all the harmonies of Nature,--the beautiful Northern girl still sometimes dreamed of the fays and elves of her native clime, of the angels and mysteries of the Christian religion which had soothed her childhood. The credulity of her early days had not obscured her understanding; she thought freely, and sought sincerely for the truth; while regretting perhaps that she no longer believed in the paradise of the preachers, she felt nevertheless a strong desire to live forever. Death seemed to her a cruel injustice. She never thought of her mother lying on her death-bed in the ripe beauty of her thirtieth year,--taken away to the green and fragrant cemetery, filled with the songs of birds, while the roses were in full bloom; crossed off the book of life while all Nature still sang, still bloomed and shone,--she never thought of her mother's pale face, as I said, without a sudden shudder creeping all over her from head to foot. No, her mother was not dead! She would not die at thirty, or at any time! And he? He die! That sublime mind to be blotted out by a stoppage of the heart or breath? No, it was not possible! Men are mistaken! We shall know some day! Then, too, sometimes she thought of these mysteries under a form rather more æsthetic and sentimental than scientific; but she thought of them. All her questionings, her doubts, the secret object of her conversations, perhaps her rapidly developed attachment for her friend,--the cause of it all was the insatiable thirst for knowledge which consumed her soul. She hoped in him because she had already found in his writings a solution to the highest problems. He had taught her to know the universe; and she found this knowledge more beautiful, more vivid, more poetic, grander, than the old errors and illusions. From the time when he told her that life had no object other than the search for truth, she had felt sure that he would find it; and her mind clung to and bound itself to his even more strongly than her heart. [Illustration]