"I will give directions to my servant. I am grateful to you now for your visit. I see you did not design to do me a rudeness. I should have received you more courteously; but I am not always my own mistress."

"Indeed?" I answered; "your candour is too charming to require excuses. You must believe that such ingenuousness is very refreshing to one who, like myself, has wasted the best part of his days amid sophisticated and conventional society, where truth is never possible because it must always be offensive."

"Don't you find it dull at Elmore Court ?"

"No; I spend the greater portion of my time in reading. Besides, I have a companion-a gentleman accomplished enough to be of great use to me in my studies."

"You are a young man," she said, eyeing me intently, “and it is unusual for young men to banish themselves from life and its pleasures, especially if they have money."

"I admire your incredulity," I answered, laughing, "for it gives me an excuse to tell you more of myself than I could otherwise have done. I mean, that a voluntary confession would have smacked rather egotistic."

She left her chair and began to pace up and down the room. was fascinated by her form, the beautiful curve of her breast, the proportioned waist, her erect stature, and the unconscious grace of her movements. When her face was towards me her eyes were invariably on mine; there was in them an unsmiling sparkle, a grave glow, that gave unreality to their gaze, a spectral beauty to their depths.

"I took Elmore Court," I continued, "not because I was tired of, but because I wanted to enjoy, life."

"You thought that abstinence would create appetite ?"

"I wished to learn the art of living;, and this, I saw, was only to be accomplished by study, by thought, and by awakening aspirations which should be lofty enough to make their achievement laborious."

"What do you hope to do?"

"Much."

"You will do little. Ah! you think I mean that you have no talent? I have not said so. How should I know your gifts and deficiencies? But life itself is one huge disappointment. The more laborious the effort the more dreadful the failure. Pray don't fancy I think only of books, or art, or science. I know nothing of these things; and they make but a very small portion of life. I have the passions in my mind-love, hope, patience and the like-all these things end in regret." "Your logic is very dispiriting," said I, watching her with increasing admiration. "It would leave life nerveless, and make death its only aspiration.'

"Do you think life ends in death ?"

"The life of the flesh, certainly."

"The flesh has nothing to do with life. It is the spirit that lives. My flesh might have been dead last night when you saw. me: for I heard and felt nothing. No! it was all as blank to me as my sight when I shut my eyes so;" she closed her eyes like a child would have done. "I might have been dead, and to myself was as dead as ever I shall be when I am in the grave."

I was about to speak, when she suddenly said, " Mr. Thorburn, you are making a long call."

"I must plead you as my excuse," I answered, rising, hardly knowing whether to look grave or smile, so bewildered was I by her manners and conversation: her brusquerie, of which her beauty qualified the rudeness; her severity, tempered by a childishness which made all her moods but new points of view of her charms.

I took my hat: she opened the door.

"I hope, Mrs. Fraser," said I, "that you will not deny me the pleasure of meeting you again ?"

"I have not come to Cliffegate for society, Mr. Thorburn."

"Nor I. But a single individual does not make society. Besides, would not my having met you twice under circumstances so uncommon justify my claiming a privilege to which no one else in this place could pretend ?"

"What privilege?"

"The privilege of knowing you and meeting you. It was, at least, promised me in a dream. You will not set aside a promise so mysterious?"

"Are you a fatalist? I am. If you are not, you will ridicule my weakness, as you will call it. But much may be forgiven to persons who lead such self-contained lives as I. So, if we are to become friends, our friendship is preordained, and my rebelling against it would be foolish."

"If we are to be friends, I shall become a fatalist. A creed made tempting by such a reward is irresistible. I have your permission to call again ?"

"You are your own master."

The reply was sufficient. I extended my hand; she gave me hers. I held it for a moment, and we separated.

CHAPTER VII.

MARTELLI was in the library when I entered. He sat deep in an armchair, his legs crossed, his face hid behind a folio.

"I have seen my apparition," said I cheerfully.

"I guessed so by the time you were absent," he answered, looking at the clock.

"I hope my resolute behaviour vindicates my courage, or at least excuses my former fears."

"You have renewed the pretty ancient legend, and have changed your shape of marble into a breathing woman. It certainly shows some hardihood and much tact to have penetrated into her presence. She seems, by your account, to have taken the white veil of solitude, and is dead to all the world."

"After an interview with a beautiful woman," I cried effusively, looking round upon the bookshelves, "how flat, stale, weary, and unprofitable appears everything else! The dead are all very well in their way-nil nisi bonum—but there is something in the large black eye of a woman-a divinity, a power, an inspiration-that makes poetry, philosophy and the fine arts very second-rate, somehow."

"No, sir; the rate is not changed; it is a only temporary eclipsea shadow dimming a light."

Well," said I, "for my part, I adore black eyes; I refer particularly to Mrs. Fraser's. If I were called upon to name the most harmonious contrast in the world, I should say black eyes and yellow hair. Oh! she is the loveliest, the most fascinating, the wildest, sweetest, strangest woman in the wide world!"

"Your interview has been satisfactory, I presume?" he remarked drily. "She must bave been prepared for your visit and met you with the most polished and facile of her arts."

"There was nothing polished or facile about her. On the contrary, she was rude."

"Indeed!"

"Yes-what would be called rude were I to write it down. But you know I am a bit of a gourmand and relish pungent condiments. Her manner is indeed the only sauce piquante that would suit her beauty." "We forgive in proportion as we love,' says Rochefoucauld, a man of the world."

"There is nothing to forgive-but there is much to love. There is a shrewd sweetness about her that took me mightily. Solitude has made her primitive. Had Byron met her we should have had a poem on the beautiful savage, with her coy and mutinous manners, with the light of golden sands upon her hair and the shine of torrid suns upon her eyes. Hear me now, Martelli, and marvel!" I continued, striking a heroic attitude. "When she speaks she looks like liberty incarnate; there is freedom in her royal gestures; pliancy and power in her step; her exquisite form undulates to her thoughts like the shadow of a dryad seen in a breezy pool!"

'This, sir, is love. Your language has about it the poetic ambiguity that no other passion would dictate."

"It is love! I avow it. I am in love with this woman."

"I think I can understand you, sir. You have cultivated this

emotion for the purpose of utilising it. You are giving it full licence that you may properly observe its operation. When fully developed, you will anatomise it, study its conformation, and having enlarged your knowledge of human nature by the examination, bury the corpse of the passion as the doctors bury the subjects they have dissected."

"No, this is not my intention," I answered, laughing heartily; "emotion is too valuable to be wasted in the pursuit of knowledge." "Pardon me, sir, but-do you propose to marry her?"

"If she will have me."

"She is to be congratulated on her beauty. It must be of a rare and powerful kind to strike love at one blow into a heart which I thought was surfeited with this sort of thing."

"Her beauty is rare and powerful too."

"It must be, to achieve such a victory over the experience that had driven you into the cool and calm dominion of intellectual love."

"Can I not occupy both dominions? Must intellect be denied me because I fall in love?" I asked, attributing the sarcastic emphasis of his language to a fear that my marriage would lose him his situation.

"I think not," he answered. "My experience of knowledge is, that it is a jealous god. Surely sir, your resolution is abrupt! You have declared your intention only to excite my wonder!"

"On the contrary, I am quite sincere when I tell you that I am head over heels in love with this woman, and that I would marry her to-morrow if I thought she would accept me."

He rose, went to the window, stared out for some moments, and then approached me.

"If I understood you aright, Mr. Thorburn, your object in residing here was to enable you to lay in such a stock of knowledge as would enable you to contest for fame with a good promise of success?" I nodded.

"You even went, sir, to the expense of furnishing this house, that you might burden yourself with obligations which should not be got rid of without inconvenience and loss."

"True."

"That you did, that your resolution, should it grow impaired by fatigue or caprice, would still be hampered with difficulties enough to make its decay slow or even impossible."

"Weli?" said I, wondering at his solemnity and long preamble. "Is it possible, sir, I ask respectfully, that you will abandon your large and dignified enterprise for a lady of whom you know nothing?" "You only make me sensible of the capriciousness of my character," I answered, laughing; "but you could not shake the love this lady has inspired."

"Sir," he said courteously, "nothing would justify the freedom of my language but the knowledge that one of the duties you desired me

to discharge, was to stimulate your energies when I found them flagging. But as you have determined to alter your views, I shall of course consider those duties at an end."

"Why?" I asked. "What avenues in life would be closed to me as a married man that are opened to me as a bachelor? A man is not bound to be idle, is not prohibited from meditating as ambitiously as he chooses, because he gives his name to a woman.

"I do not say, sir, that you may not recur hereafter to your schemes; but you may reckon on being very indisposed for study for a good time now. This lady will occupy your thoughts to the exclusion of all things else, before marriage and for long after. Love-making is an absorbing occupation. To a poor man it may be a stimulus, for he may have to work in order to wed; but to a rich man it is usually a soporific."

“My good friend,” I exclaimed, “you speak as though my marriage were a fixed matter. Let us look at the truth. I am in love with this lady, it is true-but she is not in love with me. I may have to be importunate to procure her consent-should she ever vouchsafe her consent, which, between you and me, I have no earthly reason to suppose likely; and importunities, to be successful, must be often delayed and never vehement. I should regret your leaving me; and should regret it the more if you resolve to go before my future takes a more definite character. My wishes will of course impel me to bring this love of mine to an issue as speedily as she will let me; but I really like your company too well to wish you to regulate your conduct by a contingency which, I fear, may prove the reverse of inevitable."

He paced the room, eyeing me from time to time with a gaze uncertain and agitated. His brow was clouded.

"I am very grateful to you for your kindness to me," he said, " and I will avail myself of it to think a little before I decide. I shall be selfish enough to hope that your marriage will not happen. We have been going on well-very well. It would be a pity that this pleasant life should be disturbed. I am much obliged to you for your courtesy," he repeated, "and you are very kind to have listened to my plainspeaking so good-naturedly."

To this I made some reply, and the subject dropped.

"Here," thought I, "is an illustration of the genuine southern character the warm and sudden humours; the irritable pets and fumes; the querulous misgivings; the effusive gratitude; the morbid distrust. Here too, is a living example of the penalty of thought. The brain of this smart little man has been playing so long and so remorselessly on his nerves, that they have at last grown unfit for use. Coffee and tobacco, too, have done their part, and have converted this sallow being into a bundle of shuddering sensibilities. Because I talk of