“It is a pretty room, is it not?” said Lawrence.  “You look at it as if it pleased you.  How much more comfort there is about it than in the fashionable parlors of the day!  It is solid, substantial comfort.”

“You look at it as if you had seen it before,” said Otho to Isabella.  “Do you know the room impressed me in that way, too?”

“It is singular,” said Lawrence, “the feeling, that ’all this has been before,’ that comes over one at times.  I have heard it expressed by a great many people.”

“Have you, indeed, ever had this feeling?” asked Isabella.

“Certainly,” replied Lawrence; “I say to myself sometimes, ’I have been through all this before!’ and I can almost go on to tell what is to come next,—­it seems so much a part of my past experience.”

“It is strange it should be so with you,—­and with you too,” she said, turning to Otho.

“Perhaps we are all more alike than we have thought,” said Otho.

Otho’s mother appeared, and the conversation took another turn.

Isabella did not go to the Willows again, until all the Lester family were summoned there to a large party that Mrs. Blanchard gave.  She called it a house-warming, although she had been in the house some time.  It was a beautiful evening.  A clear moonlight made it as brilliant outside on the lawn as the lights made the house within.  There was a band of music stationed under the shrubbery, and those who chose could dance.  Those who were more romantic wandered away down the shaded walks, and listened to the dripping of the fountain.

Lawrence and Isabella returned from a walk through the grounds, and stopped a moment on the terrace in front of the house.  Just then a dark cloud appeared in the sky, threatening the moon.  The wind, too, was rising, and made a motion among the leaves of the trees.

“Do you remember,” asked Lawrence, “that child’s story of the Fisherman and his Wife? how the fisherman went down to the sea-shore, and cried out,—­

    ’O man of the sea,
    Come listen to me! 
    For Alice, my wife,
    The plague of my life,
  Has sent me to beg a boon of thee!’

The sea muttered and roared;—­do you remember?  There was always something impressive to me in the descriptions, in the old story, of the changes in the sea, and of the tempest that rose up, more and more fearful, as the fisherman’s wife grew more ambitious and more and more grasping in her desires, each time that the fisherman went down to the sea-shore.  I believe my first impression of the sea came from that.  The coming on of a storm is always associated with it.  I always fancy that it is bringing with it something beside the tempest,—­that there is something ruinous behind it.”

“That is more fanciful than you usually are,” said Isabella; “but, alas!  I cannot remember your story, for I never read it.”

“That is where your education and Celia’s was fearfully neglected,” said Lawrence; “you were not brought up on fairy stories and Mother Goose.  You have not needed the first, as Celia has; but Mother Goose would have given a tone to your way of thinking, that is certainly wanting.”