There was not—­and I distinctly repeat it—­the slightest foundation in my knowledge for any surmise of the kind.  But there is a species of intuition,—­either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a fact,—­which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.  The soul gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when a vegetable diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood.  Vapors then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood, but sometimes truth.  The spheres of our companions have, at such periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when robust health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy.  Zenobia’s sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed me, during this period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical clairvoyant.

Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment (though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost perfection of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was not exactly maiden-like.  What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did?  What girl had ever spoken in her mellow tones?  Her unconstrained and inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery.  Yet sometimes I strove to be ashamed of these conjectures.  I acknowledged it as a masculine grossness—­a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is often guilty towards the other sex—­thus to mistake the sweet, liberal, but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition.  Still, it was of no avail to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.  Pertinaciously the thought, “Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived and loved!  There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly developed rose!”—­irresistibly that thought drove out all other conclusions, as often as my mind reverted to the subject.

Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of the point to which it led me.

“Mr. Coverdale,” said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while she arranged my gruel on the table, “I have been exposed to a great deal of eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but never, I think, to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of favoring me with.  I seem to interest you very much; and yet—­or else a woman’s instinct is for once deceived—­I cannot reckon you as an admirer.  What are you seeking to discover in me?”

“The mystery of your life,” answered I, surprised into the truth by the unexpectedness of her attack.  “And you will never tell me.”

She bent her head towards me, and let me look into her eyes, as if challenging me to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her consciousness.

“I see nothing now,” said I, closing my own eyes, “unless it be the face of a sprite laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well.”