“You speak as if you feared more for her than I do,” said I, struck by the foreboding look in his face.

“You women judge only by your own hearts, or by solitary instances; and you forget the inevitable downward course of wrong tendencies.  Besides, she has neither lofty principle nor a strong will.  You will think I mistake here; but I don’t mean she has not wilfulness enough.  A strong will generally excludes wilfulness,—­and the converse.”

This conversation made me nervous.

I had such an intense anxiety for her now, that I could not avoid expressing it often and strongly in my letters to her.  I wondered Lewis was not more open-eyed.  I blamed him for letting her run on so heedlessly into habits which might compromise her reputation for dignity and discretion, if no worse.  Then I would recall her manner the last evening she was with us, when, although her want of self-regulation was very apparent, not less so was the native nobleness and purity of her soul.  I could not think of this “unsphered angel wofully astray” without inward tears that dimmed the vision of my foreboding heart.

Could Lewis mistake her indifference?  Could he avoid suffering from it?  Could he, for a moment, accept her conventional expletives in place of the irrepressible and endearing tokens of a real love?  Could he see what had weaned her from him, and was still, like a baleful star, wiling her farther and farther on its treacherously lighted path?  Could he see,—­feel?—­had he a heart?  These questions I incessantly asked myself.

In the last days of summer we went with the children to Nantasket Beach.

We had walked to a point of rocks at some distance from the bay, above which we lodged, and were sitting in the luxury of quiet companionship, gazing out on the water.

The ineffable, still beauty of Nature, separated from the usual noises of actual life,—­the brilliant effect of the long reaches of color from the plunging sun, as it dipped, and reappeared, and dipped again, as loath to leave its field of beauty,—­then the still plash against the rocks, and the subsidence in murmurs of the retiring wave, with all its gathered treasure of pebbles and shells,—­all these sounds and sights of reposeful life suggested unspeakable thoughts and memories that clung to silence.  We had not been without so much sorrow in life as does not well afford to dwell on its own images; and we rose to retrace our steps to the measure of the eternal and significant psalm of the sea.

As we turned away, we both perceived at once a sail in the distance, against the western sky.  It had just rounded the nearest point and was coming slowly in with a gentle breeze, when it suddenly tacked and put out to sea again.  It had come so near, however, that with our glass we saw that it was a small boat, holding two persons, and with a single sail.

Immediately after, a dead calm succeeded the light wind which had before rippled the distant waves, and we watched the boat, lying as if asleep and floating lazily on the red water against the blazing sky,—­or rather, itself like a cradle, so pavilioned was it with gorgeous cloud-curtains, and fit home for the two water-sprites lying in the slant sunbeams.