half lost in darkness, half white in starlight.
And there I, too, beheld the haunting Luminous
Shadow, the spectral effigies of the mysterious
being, whose very existence in the flesh was a
riddle unsolved by my reason. Distinctly I saw
the Shadow, but its light was far paler, its outline
far more vague, than when I had beheld it
before. I took courage, as I felt Lilian's heart
beating against my own. I advanced—I crossed
the threshold—the Shadow was gone.

"There is no Shadow here—no phantom to
daunt thee, my life's life," said I, bending over
Liliian.

"It has touched me in passing; I feel it—cold,
cold, cold!" she answered, faintly.

I bore her to her room, placed her on her bed,
struck a light, watched over her. At dawn there
was a change in her face, and from that time
health gradually left her; strength slowly,
slowly, yet to me perceptibly, ebbed from her
life away.

CHAPTER LXXIII.

MONTHS upon months have rolled on since
the night in which Lilian had watched for my
coming amidst the chilling airs under the haunting
moon. I have said that from the date of
that night her health began gradually to fail, but
in her mind there was evidently at work some
slow revolution. Her visionary abstractions
were less frequent; when they occurred, less
prolonged. There was no longer in her soft face
that celestial serenity which spoke her content
in her dreams; but often a look of anxiety and
trouble. She was even more silent than before;
but when she did speak, there were now evident
some struggling gleams of memory. She startled
us, at times, by a distinct allusion to the events
and scenes of her early childhood. More than
once she spoke of common-place incidents and
mere acquaintances at L——.  At last she
seemed to recognise Mrs. Ashleigh as her
mother; but me, as Allen Fenwick, her
betrothed, her bridegroom, no! Once or twice
she spoke to me of her beloved as of a stranger
to myself, and asked me not to deceive her
—should she ever see him again? There was one
change in this new phase of her state that
wounded me to the quick. She had always
previously seemed to welcome my presence; now
there were hours, sometimes days together, in
which my presence was evidently painful to her.
She would become agitated when I stole into
her room—make signs to me to leave her—grow
yet more disturbed if I did not immediately
obey, and become calm again when I was
gone.

Faber sought constantly to sustain my courage
and administer to my hopes by reminding me of
the prediction he had hazarded—viz. that through
some malady to the frame the reason would be
ultimately restored.

He said, "Observe!  her mind was first roused
from its slumber by the affectionate,
unconquered impulse of her heart. You were absent
—the storm alarmed her—she missed you
—feared for you. The love within her, not
alienated, though latent, drew her thoughts
into definite human tracks. And thus, the words,
that you tell me she uttered when you appeared
before her, were words of love, stricken, though
as yet irregularly, as the winds strike the
harpstrings, from chords of awakened memory.
The same unwonted excitement, together with
lengthened exposure to the cold night air, will
account for the shock to her physical system,
and the languor and waste of strength by which
it has been succeeded."

"Ay, and the Shadow that we both saw within
the threshold. What of that?"

"Are there no records on evidence, which
most physicians of very extended practice will
perhaps allow that their experience more or less
tends to confirm—no records of the singular
coincidences between individual impressions which
are produced by sympathy? Now, whether you or
your Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow I
know not. Perhaps before it appeared to you
in the wizard's chamber, it had appeared to her
by the Monks' Well. Perhaps, as it came to you
in the prison, so it lured her through the solitudes,
associating its illusory guidance with dreams of
you. And again, when she saw it within your
threshold, your phantasy, so abruptly invoked,
made you see with the eyes of your Lilian!
Does this doctrine of sympathy, though by that
very mystery you two loved each other at first
—though, without it, love at first sight were in
itself an incredible miracle,— does, I say, this
doctrine of sympathy seem to you inadmissible?
Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the
conjecture I before threw out? Have certain
organisations like that of Margrave the power
to impress, through space, the imaginations of
those over whom they have forced a control? I
know not. But if they have, it is not supernatural;
it is but one of those operations in
Nature so rare and exceptional, and of which
testimony and evidence are so imperfect and so
liable to superstitious illusions, that they have
not yet been traced; as, if truthful, no doubt
they can be, by the patient genius of science,
to one of those secondary causes by which
the Creator ordains that Nature shall act on
Man."

By degrees I became dissatisfied with my
conversations with Faber. I yearned for explanations;
all guesses but bewildered me more. In
his family, with one exception, I found no
congenial association. His nephew seemed to me
an ordinary specimen of a very trite human
nature—a young man of limited ideas, fair moral
tendencies, going mechanically right where not
tempted to go wrong. The same desire of gain
which had urged him to gamble and speculate
when thrown in societies rife with such example,
led him, now in the Bush, to healthful, industrious,
persevering labour. Spes fovet agricolas,
says the poet; the same Hope which entices the
fish to the hook, impels the plough of the husbandman.
The young farmer's young wife was somewhat
superior to him; she had more refinement
of taste, more culture of mind, but, living in his
life, she was inevitably levelled to his ends and