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impression of his character upon hers. It was mentally and morally, no less than actually, that in childhood she had looked up to him; and as childhood expanded and deepened into womanhood, and the horizon of her nature enlarged its scope, she still found in the mind of Edmond the same distance and the same height, and still looked up to him with the same wondering, trustful gaze. Thus the growth of her nature had changed nothing in the relations of it to his; for her power to ask still fell short of his power to give, and the same surpassing proportions still returned the lavish response to the larger need.

It was the critical, the decisive moment in which it had become possible for the lives of these two beings to commingle and amalgamate into one; nay, in which it was certain that they must indissolubly so amalgamate, if only the deeper and more thoughtful feeling with which, in the dawn of her new self-consciousness, Juliet now regarded Edmond, should be met and seized at the outset by the merest impulsion on his part, and so imperceptibly turned into the direction. which a woman's feelings, in that moment of her life when they are first discovered by herself, take all at once and once for all, at the lightest touch of a loving hand.

But the moment slipped away. Passion only knows how to strike the want into the will, and grasp the intention in the act; for passion only, knowing well and surely what it wants, stretches out the hand to take it in rude natures, rashly, without thought; in strong natures, instinctively, without thinking.

Edmond was devoid of passion. Contemplating its

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own sensations, this nature soared and hovered, as it were, with outstretched wings over its proper consciousness, in a region of passionless perception, attracting into itself the outer world, and there transforming actual objects into ideal images, instead of boldly passing out of itself into the world of external things, and there firmly planting the foot of conquest on the ground of possession. Thus to him, his sensations about facts were facts. He thought to pass his life forever with Juliet. He could contemplate no other circumstantial possibility. This thought was firmly established in him. It remained a thought. The process of thinking it once completed, nothing else presented itself to his mind as necessary and natural to the realization of it. The farther process of acting it out did not occur to him-to him the thought was an action. The matter was fully and finally settled in his mind, and so in his mind it remained. It was a virgin sentiment in a virgin nature which realizes possession in the reality of the feeling by which it is possessed. Thus the days passed tranquilly and happily away.

The long-delayed arrival of Edmond's Egyptian wonders, however, was a great event at the chateau. Unheard-of preparations had been made for the reception of these venerable visitors. Half the house had been turned topsy-turvy on their account. To assimilate the aspect of the new museum to that of the marvels it was destined to contain, some of the old mediæval chambers had been duly Egyptianized. The Gothic fireplaces, furnished after much difficulty by the village mason with an adequate quantity of py

lones and capitals, gradually contrived to assume as sepulchral and forbidding an appearance as could possibly be desired, and finally looked as proud of themselves as if the only ashes they had ever contained were those of Osiris himself.

The workmen had bivouacked in the best rooms, and kept up a series of light skirmishes about the rest of the house for several months; so that, when at last the arrival of the gods was announced, all was in readiness for their reception with due honor and dignity.

It was some time before the untraveled members of the household felt themselves to be on quite friendly terms with the mummies. But the beautiful serious sphinges, with their smooth lion-limbs, and serene human faces, immediately made themselves perfectly at home. Speedy popularity, too, was acquired by the placid divinities themselves, with their quiet, astonished, childish faces, notwithstanding their very distressing habit of permanently keeping one leg raised at an angle of thirty degrees above the ground, apparently with no object but to make one feel uncomfortable in trying to realize the extent of discomfort suggested by such a position. Their neat priestly headdresses (worn to this day in Egypt), and their quiet behavior, and sleek, lustrous limbs of polished granite, did much, moreover, to mollify in their favor the instinctive repugnance for "pagan idols, and outlandish, heathenish images," with which the uncritical menial mind was disposed at first to regard these chaste embodiments of the speculative thought of Ancient Egypt. Every body cheerfully lent a helping hand to the arrangement of the museum, which soon pre

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