愛紛飛，情纏綿

Her hair fell loose and floated over her shoulders, her eyes shot forth her feelings as though they had been arrows. She triumphed over her rival. Balthazar lifted her, carried her to the sofa, and knelt at her feet.

“Have I caused you such grief?” he said , in the tone of a man waking from a painful dream.

“My poor Claes! yes, and , in spite of yourself,” she said, passing her hand over his hair. “Sit here beside me,” she continued, pointing to the sofa. “Ah! I can forget it all now, now that you come back to us; all can be repaired — but you will not abandon me again? say that you will not! My noble husband, grant me a woman’s influence on your heart, that influence which is so needful to the happiness of suffering artists, to the troubled minds of great men . You may be harsh to me, angry with me if you will, but let me check you a little for your good. I will never abuse the power if you will grant it. Be famous, but be happy too. Do not love Chemistry better than you love us. Hear me, we will be generous; we will let Science share your heart; but oh! my Claes, be just; let us have our half. Tell me, is not my disinterestedness sublime Medilase?”

She made him smile. With the marvellous art such women possess, she carried the momentous question into the regions of pleasantry where women reign. But though she seemed to laugh, her heart was violently contracted and could not easily recover the quiet even action that was habitual to it. And yet, as she saw in the eyes of Balthazar the rebirth of a love which was once her glory, the full return of a power she thought she had lost, she said to him with a smile:—

“Believe me, Balthazar, nature made us to feel SIEM Service; and though you may wish us to be mere electrical machines, yet your gases and your ethereal disengaged matters will never explain the gift we possess of looking into futurity.”

“Yes,” he exclaimed, “by affinity. The power of vision which makes the poet, the power of deduction which makes the man of science, are based on invisible affinities, intangible, imponderable, which vulgar minds class as moral phenomena, whereas they are physical effects. The prophet sees and deduces. Unfortunately, such affinities are too rare and too obscure to be subjected to analysis or observation.”