It was half an hour from the time Mr. Dexter left his wife, when he returned.  His hand upon the lock aroused her from the waking dream into which she had fallen.  As she arose, her manner began to change, and, ere she had reached the door, the quicker flowing blood was restoring the color to her cheeks.  She had passed through a long and severe struggle; and woman’s virtue, aided by woman’s pride and will, had conquered.

Mrs. Dexter spoke to her husband cheerfully as he came in, and met his steady, searching look without a sign of confusion.  He was at fault.  Yet not deceived.

“Are you better?” he asked.

“Much better,” she replied; and turning from him, went on with the arrangement of her toilet, which had been suspended from the period of her husband’s absence, until his return.  Mr. Dexter passed into their private parlor, adjoining the bedroom, and remained there until his wife had finished dressing.

“Shall we go down?” he inquired, as she came in looking so beautiful in his eyes that the very sight of her surpassing loveliness gave him pain.  The Fiend was in his heart.

“Not now,” she replied “I am still fatigued with the day’s travel, and had rather not see company at present.”

She glanced from the window.

“What a sublimity there is in the ocean!” she said, with an unusual degree of interest in her manner, when speaking to her husband.  “I can never become so familiar with its grandeur and vastness, as to look upon its face without emotion.  You remember Byron’s magnificent apostrophe?—­

“‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.’”

And she repeated several of the stanzas from “Childe Harold,” with an effect that stirred her husband’s feelings more profoundly than they had ever been stirred by nature and poetry before.

“I have read and heard that splendid passage many times, but never with the meaning and power which your voice has lent to the poet’s words,” said Dexter, gazing with admiration upon his wife.

He sat down beside her, and took her hand in his.  Her eyes wandered to his face, and lingered there as if she were searching the lineaments for a sign of something that her heart could take hold upon and cling to.  And it was even so; for she felt that she needed strength and protection in an hour of surely coming trial.  A feeble sigh and a drooping of the eyelids attested her disappointment.  And yet as he leaned towards her she did not sit more erect, but rather suffered her body to incline to him.  He still retained her hand, and she permitted him to toy with it, even slightly returning the pressure he gave.

“You shall be my teacher in the love of nature.”  He spoke with a glow of true feeling.  “The lesson of this evening I shall never forget.  Old ocean will always wear a different aspect in my eyes.”

“Nature,” replied Mrs. Dexter, “is not a mere dead symbol.—­It is something more—­an outbirth from loving principles—­the body of a creating soul.  The sea, upon whose restless surface we are gazing, is something more than a briny fluid, bearing ships upon its bosom—­something more than a mirror for the arching heavens—­something more than a symbol of immensity and eternity.  There is a truth in nature far deeper, more divine, and of higher significance.”