The gates ajar. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

The Gates Ajar. 57
VI.
May 9.
As I was looking over the green book last
night, Aunt Winifred came up behind me and
softly laid a bunch of violets down between
the leaves.
By an odd contrast, the contented, passionless things fell against those two verses that
were copied from the German, and completely
covered them from sight. I lifted the flowers, and held up the page for her to see.
As she read, her face altered strangely; her
eyes dilated, her lip quivered, a flush shot over
her cheeks and dyed her forehead up to the
waves of her hair. I turned away quickly,
feeling that I had committed a rudeness in
watching her, and detecting in her, however involuntarily, some far, inner sympathy,
or shadow of a long-past sympathy, with the
desperate words.
" Mary," she said, laying down the book, "I
believe Satan wrote that."
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