Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself.  She only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often gives us,—­such as a child’s trivial gesture or movement makes a parent feel,—­that impalpable something which in the slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart.  This was all.  But it was true that what she saw meant a great deal.  It meant the dawning in Myrtle Hazard of one of her as yet unlived secondary lives.  Bathsheba’s virgin perceptions had caught a faint early ray of its glimmering twilight.

She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has made seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and that she did not know about Susan’s sentiments.  Only, as they had kept so long to each other, she supposed there must be love between them.

Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to look upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds of Myrtle’s imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan’s pretty fancies.  She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified ancestress, but on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the splendors of her full-blown womanhood.

The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as the glance at him already given might have foreshadowed.  But his features had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and the sober tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had given him a maturity beyond his years.  The story was not an uncommon one.  At sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream.  At eighteen he had awoke, and found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to his so that its life was dependent on his own.  Whether it would have perished if its filaments had been gently disentangled from the object to which they had attached themselves, experienced judges of such matters may perhaps question.  To justify Clement in his estimate of the danger of such an experiment, we must remember that to young people in their teens a first passion is a portentous and unprecedented phenomenon.  The young man may have been mistaken in thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and may have done more than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it was the mistake of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another’s feelings by his own.  He measured the depth of his own rather by what he felt they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.

Clement was called a “genius” by those who knew him, and was consequently in danger of being spoiled early.  The risk is great enough anywhere, but greatest in a new country, where there is an almost universal want of fixed standards of excellence.