"Every thing," did I say? Yes, _even myself_--for my uncomely face and form were such a foil to his beauty as a skillful artist would have introduced to heighten it when all other art was exhausted, and every one saw it except Stephania; and little they knew how, with perceptions far quicker than theirs, I _felt_ their recognition of this, in the degree of softer kindness in which they unconsciously spoke to me. They pitied me, and without recognizing their own thought--for it was a striking instance of the difference in the gifts of nature--one man looking scarce possible to love, and beside him, another, of the same age, to whose mere first-seen beauty, without a word from his lips, any heart would seem unnatural not to leap in passionate surrender.
We were the best of sudden friends, Palgray and I. He, like the rest, walked only the outer vestibule of the sympathies, viewlessly deepening and extending, hour by hour, in that frank and joyous circle. The interlinkings of soul, which need no language, and which go on, whether we will or no, while we talk with friends, are so strangely unthought of by the careless and happy. He saw in me no counter-worker to his influence. I was to him but a well-bred and extremely plain man, who tranquilly submitted to forego all the first prizes of life, content if I could contribute to society in its unexcited voids, and receive in return only the freedom of its outer intercourse, and its friendly esteem. But, oh! it was not in the same world that he and I knew Stephania. He approached her from the world in whose most valued excellences, beauty and wealth, he was pre-eminently gifted--I, from the viewless world, in which I had at least more skill and knowledge. In the month that I had known her before he came, I had sedulously addressed myself to a character within her, of which Palgray had not even a conjecture; and there was but one danger of his encroachment on the ground I had gained--her imagination might supply in him the nobler temple of soul-worship, which was still unbuilt, and which would never be builded except by pangs such as he was little likely to feel in the undeepening channel of happiness. He did not notice that _I_ never spoke to her in the same key of voice to which the conversation of others was attuned. He saw not that, while she turned to _him_ with a smile as a preparation to listen, she heard _my_ voice as if her attention had been arrested by distant music--with no change in her features except a look more earnest. She would have called _him_ to look with her at a glowing sunset, or to point out a new comer in the road from the village; but if the moon had gone suddenly into a cloud and saddened the face of the landscape, or if the wind had sounded mournfully through the trees, as she looked out upon the night, she would have spoken of that first to _me_.