blushed at being caught in such an evident scrutiny of
Professor Westervelt and his affairs. Perhaps I did blush. Be that as it might,
I retained presence of mind enough not to make my position yet more irksome, by
the poltroonery of drawing back.
    Westervelt looked into the depths of the drawing-room, and beckoned.
Immediately afterwards, Zenobia appeared at the window, with color much
heightened, and eyes which, as my conscience whispered me, were shooting bright
arrows, barbed with scorn, across the intervening space, directed full at my
sensibilities as a gentleman. If the truth must be told, far as her flight-shot
was, those arrows hit the mark. She signified her recognition of me by a gesture
with her head and hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal. The next
moment, she administered one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has
at hand, ready for an offence, (and which she so seldom spares, on due
occasion,) by letting down a white linen curtain between the festoons of the
damask ones. It fell like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the interval between
the acts.
    Priscilla had disappeared from the boudoir. But the dove still kept her
desolate perch, on the peak of the attic-window.
 

                          XIX. Zenobia's Drawing-Room

The remainder of the day, so far as I was concerned, was spent in meditating on
these recent incidents. I contrived, and alternately rejected, innumerable
methods of accounting for the presence of Zenobia and Priscilla, and the
connection of Westervelt with both. It must be owned, too, that I had a keen,
revengeful sense of the insult inflicted by Zenobia's scornful recognition, and
more particularly by her letting down the curtain; as if such were the proper
barrier to be interposed between a character like hers, and a perceptive faculty
like mine. For, was mine a mere vulgar curiosity? Zenobia should have known me
better than to suppose it. She should have been able to appreciate that quality
of the intellect and the heart, which impelled me (often against my own will,
and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other lives, and to endeavor
- by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions, by taking note of things too
slight for record, and by bringing my human spirit into manifold accordance with
the companions whom God assigned me - to learn the secret which was hidden even
from themselves.
    Of all possible observers, methought, a woman, like Zenobia, and a man, like
Hollingsworth, should have selected me