seeming already awake spontaneously within him. Here, at least, had
been one of those grand passions, such as were needed to give life
its true meaning and effect. Conscious of that rudeness in his home,
and feeding a strong natural instinct for outward beauty hitherto on
what was barely sufficient, he found for himself in this perfumed
place the centre of a fanciful world, reaching out to who could tell
what refined passages of existence in that great world beyond, of
which the echoes seemed to light here amid the stillness. On his
first visit one pensive afternoon, fitting the lately attained key in
the lock, he seemed to have drawn upon himself, yet hardly to have
disturbed, the meditations of its former occupant. A century of
unhindered summers had taken the heat from its colours--the couches,
the curtains half shading the windows, which the rain in the south-
west wind just then touched so softly. That great passion of old had
been also a dainty love, leaving [22] its impress everywhere in this
magic apartment, on the musical instruments, the books lying where
they might have fallen from the hands of the listless reader so long
since, the fragrance which the lad's movement stirred around him.
And there, on one of the windows, were the verses of King Charles,
who had slept here, as in the most courtly resting-place of the
house. On certain nights Gaston himself was not afraid to steal from
his own bed to lie in it, though still too healthy a sleeper to be
visited by the appropriate dreams he so greatly longed for.

A nature, instinctively religious, which would readily discover and
give their full value to all such facts of experience as might be
conformable thereto! But what would be the relation of this
religious sensibility to sensibilities of another kind, now awaking
in the young Gaston, as he mused in this dreamy place, surrounded by
the books, the furniture, almost the very presence of the past, which