" She was not a jealous woman, and was ready
to admire where she could, but not the less would keep even beauty at
arm's length when prudence recommended: here, thought Vavasor, prudence
would hold her peace. He would at least himself stand amid no small
amount of justification.
By degrees, and without any transition marked of Hester, emboldened
mainly by the influences of the soft dusky twilight, he came to speak
with more warmth and nearer approach. His heart was tuned above its
ordinary pitch, and he was borne a captive slave in the triumph of
Nature's hour.
"How strangely this loveliness seems to sink into the soul," he said one
evening, when the bats were coming and going like thoughts that refuse
to take shape and be shared, and when with intensest listening you could
not be sure whether it was a general murmur of nature you heard, low in
her sleep, or only the strained nerves of your own being imitating that
which was not.
"For the moment," he went on, "you seem to be the soul of that which is
around you, yet oppressed with the weight of its vastness, and unable to
account for what is going on in it."
"I think I understand you," returned Hester.
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