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　　CHAPTER II.

　　THEY had not been there long, when Pierre, who had been pacing up and down, suddenly paused, as if struck by some laggard thought, which had just occurred to him at the eleventh hour. First he looked toward Delly, as if about to bid her quit the apartment, while he should say something private to Isabel; but as if, on a second thought, holding the contrary of this procedure most advisable, he, without preface, at once addressed Isabel, in his ordinary conversational tone, so that Delly could not but plainly hear him, whether she would or no.

　　"My dear Isabel, though, as I said to thee before, my cousin, Miss Tartan, that strange, and willful, nun-like girl, is at all hazards, mystically resolved to come and live with us, yet it must be quite impossible that her friends can approve in her such a singular step; a step even more singular, Isabel, than thou, in thy unsophisticatedness, can'st at all imagine. I shall be immensely deceived if they do not, to their very utmost, strive against it. Now what I am going to add may be quite unnecessary, but I can not avoid speaking it, for all that."

　　Isabel with empty hands sat silent, but intently and expectantly eying him; while behind her chair, Delly was bending her face low over her knitting—which she had seized so soon as Pierre had begun speaking—and with trembling fingers was nervously twitching the points of her long needles. It was plain that she awaited Pierre's accents with hardly much less eagerness than Isabel. Marking well this expression in Delly, and apparently not unpleased with it, Pierre continued; but by no slightest outward tone or look seemed addressing his remarks to any one but Isabel.

　　"Now what I mean, dear Isabel, is this: if that very probable hostility on the part of Miss Tartan's friends to her fulfilling her strange resolution—if any of that hostility should chance to be manifested under thine eye, then thou certainly wilt know how to account for it; and as certainly wilt draw no inference from it in the minutest conceivable degree involving any thing sinister in me. No, I am sure thou wilt not, my dearest Isabel. For, understand me, regarding this strange mood in my cousin as a thing wholly above my comprehension, and indeed regarding my poor cousin herself as a rapt enthusiast in some wild mystery utterly unknown to me; and unwilling ignorantly to interfere in what almost seems some supernatural thing, I shall not repulse her coming, however violently her friends may seek to stay it. I shall not repulse, as certainly as I have not invited. But a neutral attitude sometimes seems a suspicious one. Now what I mean is this: let all such vague suspicions of me, if any, be confined to Lucy's friends; but let not such absurd misgivings come near my dearest Isabel, to give the least uneasiness. Isabel! tell me; have I not now said enough to make plain what I mean? Or, indeed, is not all I have said wholly unnecessary; seeing that when one feels deeply conscientious, one is often apt to seem superfluously, and indeed unpleasantly and unbeseemingly scrupulous? Speak, my own Isabel,"—and he stept nearer to her, reaching forth his arm.

　　"Thy hand is the caster's ladle, Pierre, which holds me entirely fluid. Into thy forms and slightest moods of thought, thou pourest me; and I there solidify to that form, and take it on, and thenceforth wear it, till once more thou moldest me anew. If what thou tellest me be thy thought, then how can I help its being mine, my Pierre?"

　　"The gods made thee of a holyday, when all the common world was done, and shaped thee leisurely in elaborate hours, thou paragon!"

　　So saying, in a burst of admiring love and wonder, Pierre paced the room; while Isabel sat silent, leaning on her hand, and half-vailed with her hair. Delly's nervous stitches became less convulsive. She seemed soothed; some dark and vague conceit seemed driven out of her by something either directly expressed by Pierre, or inferred from his expressions. Pierre: Or， The Ambiguities