No experience of miscellaneous flirtations, or more or less innocent
dalliance, had ever weakened the witchery of woman's charms to him, or
dulled the keenness of his sensibility to the heaven she can bestow. For
an hour he wandered about the dark and silent village street, waiting for
the tumult of his emotions to subside sufficiently to leave him in some
degree master of himself. When at last he returned to the house, his
nerves strung with the resolution to put his fortune to the test, Ida was
still in the sitting-room where he had left her.
Miss Ludington's conversation with Paul had left her in a mood
scarcely less agitated than his. The sensation with which she had
watched his devotion to Ida during the past weeks had been a sort of
double-consciousness as if it were herself whom Paul was wooing, although
at the same time she was a spectator. The thoughts and emotions which she
ascribed to Ida agitated her almost as if they had been experienced in
her proper person.
It was a fancy of hers that between herself and Ida there existed a
species of clairvoyance, which enabled her to know what was passing in
the latter's mind--a completeness of rapport never realized between any
other two minds, but nothing more than might be expected to attend such a
relationship as theirs, being a foretaste of the tie that joins the
several souls of an individual in heaven.
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