out the full secret of her great awakening in his ears; but something in his manner repelled her advances, and she withdrew more than ever into herself.
"O Love!" she cried in a tone so low and sweet that none but a messenger from the Unseen might hear, "how ungovernable art thou, and how incomprehensible! The worldly-wise may decry thee; the misanthropic may deride thee; thf vulgar may make of thy existence an unholy jest; the selfish and ignorant may trample upon thee; human laws may crush thee; but thou remainest still a thing of life, to fill thy votaries with a holy joy and endow them with the very attributes of God. An imperishable entity art thou, O Love! Thou art interblended with every fibre of my being now, and I accept thee as a sweet fulfilment of my earthly destiny."
Of course Jean was young and fond and inexperienced and foolish; and these chronicles would offer her rhapsodies as the utterances of no worldly-wise oracle. But her thoughts were fresh and pure; and who shall say they did not emanate from the very fountain of life itself, whose presence she could sense but could not understand?
She wandered off toward the rushing, maddening torrent of Snake River, whose music had for her, in these moods of introspection, but one interpretation.
"Daddie may denounce, Hal and Mame may tease, and Marjorie,—yes, and all the world deride me," she said, as she sat upon a bowlder and abandoned herself to reverie; "but henceforth there shall be nothing in this world for me to cherish but Love and its handmaiden. Duty."
Snake River, full at this point of jutting rocky islands, through which the foaming, roaring waters rushed like a thousand mill-races on parade, dashed madly against its banks beneath her feet, and rushing on again, roared and laughed and shrieked and sang. Lichens clung to the uplifted rocks, which, hoary with age and massive in proportions, held vigil in the midst of the eternal
