“This last is too stern a moral,” I observed.  “Cannot we soften it a little?”

“Do it if you like, at your own peril, not on my responsibility,” she answered.  Then, with a sudden change of subject, she went on:  “After all, he has flung away what would have served him better than the poor, pale flower he kept.  What can Priscilla do for him?  Put passionate warmth into his heart, when it shall be chilled with frozen hopes?  Strengthen his hands, when they are weary with much doing and no performance?  No! but only tend towards him with a blind, instinctive love, and hang her

little, puny weakness for a clog upon his arm!  She cannot even give him such sympathy as is worth the name.  For will he never, in many an hour of darkness, need that proud intellectual sympathy which he might have had from me?—­the sympathy that would flash light along his course, and guide, as well as cheer him?  Poor Hollingsworth!  Where will he find it now?”

“Hollingsworth has a heart of ice!” said I bitterly.  “He is a wretch!”

“Do him no wrong,” interrupted Zenobia, turning haughtily upon me.  “Presume not to estimate a man like Hollingsworth.  It was my fault, all along, and none of his.  I see it now!  He never sought me.  Why should he seek me?  What had I to offer him?  A miserable, bruised, and battered heart, spoilt long before he met me.  A life, too, hopelessly entangled with a villain’s!  He did well to cast me off.  God be praised, he did it!  And yet, had he trusted me, and borne with me a little longer, I would have saved him all this trouble.”

She was silent for a time, and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground.  Again raising them, her look was more mild and calm.

“Miles Coverdale!” said she.

“Well, Zenobia,” I responded.  “Can I do you any service?”

“Very little,” she replied.  “But it is my purpose, as you may well imagine, to remove from Blithedale; and, most likely, I may not see Hollingsworth again.  A woman in my position, you understand, feels scarcely at her ease among former friends.  New faces,—­unaccustomed looks,—­those only can she tolerate.  She would pine among familiar scenes; she would be apt to blush, too, under the eyes that knew her secret; her heart might throb uncomfortably; she would mortify herself, I suppose, with foolish notions of having sacrificed the honor of her sex at the foot of proud, contumacious man.  Poor womanhood, with its rights and wrongs!  Here will be new matter for my course of lectures, at the idea of which you smiled, Mr. Coverdale, a month or two ago.  But, as you have really a heart and sympathies, as far as they go, and as I shall depart without seeing Hollingsworth, I must entreat you to be a messenger between him and me.”

“Willingly,” said I, wondering at the strange way in which her mind seemed to vibrate from the deepest earnest to mere levity.  “What is the message?”