As Edna’s reasoning powers strengthened, Mr. Hammond led her gradually to the contemplation of some of the gravest problems that have from time immemorial perplexed and maddened humanity, plunging one half into blind, bigoted traditionalism, and scourging the other into the dreary sombre, starless wastes of Pyrrhonism.  Knowing full well that of every earnest soul and honest, profound thinker these ontologic questions would sooner or later demand audience, he wisely placed her in the philosophic palaestra, encouraged her wrestlings, cheered her on, handed her from time to time the instruments and aids she needed, and then, when satisfied that the intellectual gymnastics had properly trained and developed her, he invited her—­ where he felt assured the spirit of the age would inevitably drive her—­to the great Pythian games of speculation, where the lordly intellects of the nineteenth century gather to test their ratiocinative skill, and bear off the crown of bay on the point of a syllogism or the wings of an audacious hypothesis.

Thus immersed in study, weeks, months, and years glided by, bearing her young life swiftly across the Enna meads of girlhood, nearer and nearer to the portals of that mystic temple of womanhood, on whose fair fretted shrine was to be offered a heart either consumed by the baleful fires of Baal, or purified and consecrated by the Shekinah, promised through Messiah.

CHAPTER IX.

During the first year of Mr. Murray’s absence his brief letters to his mother were written at long intervals; in the second, they were rarer and briefer still; but toward the close of the third he wrote more frequently, and announced his intention of revisiting Egypt before his return to the land of his birth.  Although no allusion was ever made to Edna, Mrs. Murray sometimes read aloud descriptions of beautiful scenery, written now among the scoriae of Mauna Roa or Mauna Kea, and now from the pinnacle of Mount Ophir, whence, through waving forests of nutmeg and clove, flashed the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, or the silver ripples of Malacca; and, on such occasions, the orphan listened eagerly, entranced by the tropical luxuriance and grandeur of his imagery, by his gorgeous word-painting, which to her charmed ears seemed scarcely inferior to the wonderful pen-portraits of Ruskin.  Those letters seemed flecked with the purple and gold, the amber and rose, the opaline and beryline tints, of which he spoke in telling the glories of Polynesian and Malaysian skies, and the matchless verdure and floral splendors of their serene spicy dells.  For many days after the receipt of each, Mrs. Murray was graver and sadder, but the spectre that had disquieted Edna was thoroughly exorcised, and only when the cold touch of the golden key startled her was she conscious of a vague dread of some far-off but slowly and surely approaching evil.  In the fourth year of her pupilage