She gave herself up to a grave and delicious languor that seemed to
flow from shadow and silence and permeate her entire being. She passed
hours in a thoughtful repose of mind and spirit that seemed to fall
like balm from those steadfast guardians, and distill their gentle
ether in her soul; or breathed into her listening ear immunity from the
forgotten past, and security for the present. If there was no dream of
the future in this calm, even recurrence of placid existence, so much
the better. The simple details of each succeeding day, the quaint
housekeeping, the brief companionship and coming and going of her young
host--himself at best a crystallized personification of the sedate and
hospitable woods--satisfied her feeble cravings. She no longer
regretted the inferior passion that her fears had obliged her to take
the first night she came; she began to look up to this young man--so
much younger than herself--without knowing what it meant; it was not
until she found that this attitude did not detract from his
picturesqueness that she discovered herself seeking for reasons to
degrade him from this seductive eminence.
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