He stooped to light a cigar, and she walked away to her own room.

As the door closed behind her, he laughed and reiterated the favorite proverb that often crossed his lips, “Bithus contra Bacchium!”

CHAPTER XIII.

The darling scheme of authorship had seized upon Edna’s mind with a tenacity that conquered and expelled all other purposes, and though timidity and a haunting dread of the failure of the experiment prompted her to conceal the matter, even from her beloved pastor, she pondered it in secret, and bent every faculty to its successful accomplishment.  Her veneration for books—­the great eleemosynary granaries of human knowledge to which the world resorts—­extended to those who created them; and her imagination invested authors with peculiar sanctity, as the real hierophants annointed with the chrism of truth.  The glittering pinnacle of consecrated and successful authorship seemed to her longing gaze as sublime, and well-nigh as inaccessible, as the everlasting and untrodden Himalayan solitudes appear to some curious child of Thibet or Nepaul; who gamboling among pheasants and rhododendrons, shades her dazzled eyes with her hand, and looks up awe-stricken and wondering at the ice-domes and snow-minarets of lonely Deodunga, earth’s loftiest and purest altar, nimbused with the dawning and the dying light of the day.  There were times when the thought of presenting herself as a candidate for admission into the band of literary esoterics seemed to Edna unpardonably presumptuous, almost sacrilegious, and she shrank back, humbled and abashed; for writers were teachers, interpreters, expounders, discoverers, or creators—­and what could she, just stumbling through the alphabet of science and art, hope to donate to her race that would ennoble human motives or elevate aspirations?  Was she, an unknown and inexperienced girl, worthy to be girded with the ephod that draped so royally the Levites of literature?  Had God’s own hand set the Urim and Thummim of Genius in her soul?  Above all, was she mitred with the plate of pure gold—­“Holiness unto the Lord?”

Solemnly and prayerfully she weighed the subject, and having finally resolved to make one attempt, she looked trustingly to heaven for aid and went vigorously to work.  To write currente calamo for the mere pastime of author and readers, without aiming to inculcate some regenerative principle, or to photograph some valuable phase of protean truth, was in her estimation ignoble; for her high standard demanded that all books should be to a certain extent didactic, wandering like evangels among the people, and making some man, woman, or child happier, or wiser, or better—­more patient or more hopeful—­by their utterances.  Believing that every earnest author’s mind should prove a mint, where all valuable ores are collected from the rich veins of a universe—­are cautiously coined, and thence munificently circulated—­she