I would have passed her with a formal bow
but she stopped me.

"I came to inquire after poor Miss Brabazon,'
said she. "You can tell me more than the
servants can: is there no hope?"

"Let the nurse go up and watch beside her
She may pass away in the sleep into which she
has fallen."

"Allen Fenwick, I must speak with you—nay,
but for a few minutes. I hear that you leave
L——to-morrow. It is scarcely among the
chances of life that we should meet again."
While thus saying, she drew me along the lawn
down the path that led towards her own home.
"I wish," said she, earnestly, "that you could
part with a kindlier feeling towards me; but I
can scarcely expect it. Could I put myself in
your place, and be moved by your feelings,
know that I should be implacable; but I——-"

"But you, madam, are The World! and the
World governs itself, and dictates to others, by
laws which seem harsh to those who ask from
its favour the services which the World cannot
tender, for the World admits favourites but
ignores friends. You did but act to me as the
World ever acts to those who mistake its favour
for its friendship."

"It is true," said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt
candour; and we continued to walk on silently.
At length, she said, abruptly, " But do you not
rashly deprive yourself of your only consolation
in sorrow? When the heart suffers, does your
skill admit any remedy like occupation to the
mind? Yet you abandon that occupation to
which your mind is most accustomed; you desert
your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the
race, from the fame which awaits at the goal;
you go back from civilisation itself, and dream
that all your intellectual cravings can find
content in the life of a herdsman, amidst the
monotony of a wild! No, you will repent, for you are
untrue to your mind."

"I am sick of the word ' mind!' " said I,
bitterly. And therewith I relapsed into musing.

The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence
in the unravelled Sibyl Book of Nature were
mysteries strange to every man's normal practice
of thought, even if reducible to the fraudulent
impressions of outward sense: For illusions in
a brain otherwise healthy, suggest problems
in our human organisation which the colleges
that record them rather guess at than solve. But
the blow which had shattered my life had been
dealt by the hand of a fool. Here, there were
no mystic enchantments. Motives the most
common-place and paltry, suggested to a brain
as trivial and shallow as ever made the frivolity
of woman a theme for the satire of poets, had
sufficed, in devastating the field of my
affections, to blast the uses for which I had cultured
my mind; and had my intellect been as great as
Heaven ever gave to man, it would have been as
vain a shield as mine against the shaft that had
lodged in my heart. While I had, indeed, been
preparing my reason and my fortitude to meet
such perils, weird and marvellous, as those by
which tales round the winter hearth scare the
credulous child—a contrivance so vulgar and
hackneyed that not a day passes but what some
hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel—had
wrought a calamity more dread than aught which
my dark guess into the Shadow-Land, unpierced
by Philosophy, could trace to the prompting of
malignant witchcraft. So, ever this truth runs
through all legends of ghost and demon—through
the uniform records of what wonder accredits and
science rejects as the supernatural—lo! the dread
machinery whose wheels roll through Hades!
What need such awful engines for such mean
results? The first blockhead we meet in our walk
to our grocer's can tell us more than the ghost
tells us; the poorest envy we ever aroused hurts
us more than the demon! How true an
interpreter is Genius to Hell as to Earth. The Fiend
comes to Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge;
Heaven and Hell stake their cause in the Mortal's
temptation. And what does the Fiend to astonish
the Mortal? Turn wine into fire, turn love into
crime. We need no Mephistopheles to accomplish
these marvels every day!

Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of
the world-wise woman; and when she next
spoke, I looked up, and saw that we were at the
Monks' Well, where I had first seen Lilian
gazing into heaven!

Mrs. Poyntz had, as we walked, placed her
hand on my arm, and, turning abruptly from the
path into the glade, I found myself standing by
her side in the scene where a new sense of being
had first disclosed to my sight the hues with
which Love, the passionate beautifier, turns into
purple and gold the grey of the common air.
Thus, when romance has ended in sorrow, and the
Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite and
positive forms of life, banished for a time,
reappear, and deepen our mournful remembrance
of the glories they replace. And the Woman
of the World, finding how little I was induced to
respond to her when she had talked of myself,
began to speak in her habitual, clear, ringing
accents of her own social schemes and devices:

"I shall miss you when you are gone, Allen
Fenwick, for though, during the last year or so,
all actual intercourse between us has ceased, yet
my interest in you gave some occupation to my
thoughts when I sat alone—having lost my main
object of ambition in settling my daughter, and
laving no longer any one in the house with
whom I could talk of the future, or for whom I
could form a project. It is so wearisome to count
the changes which pass within us, that we take
interest in the changes that pass without.
Poyntz still has his weather-glass; I have no
longer my Jane."

"I cannot linger with you on this spot," said
I, impatiently, turning back into the path; she
followed, treading over fallen leaves. And
unleeding my interruption, she thus continued her
hard talk:

"But I am not sick of my mind as you seem