distress. So that Faber banished me from her
chamber, and, with a heart bleeding at every
fibre, I submitted to the cruel sentence.

Faber had taken up his abode in my house
and brought Amy with him; one or the other
never left Lilian, night or day. The great
physician spoke doubtfully of the case, but not
despairingly.

"Remember," he said, " that, in spite of the
want of sleep, the abstinence from food, the
form has not wasted as it would do, were this
fever inevitably mortal. It is upon that
phenomenon I build a hope that I have not been
mistaken in the opinion I hazarded from the
first. We are now in the midst of the critical
struggle between life and reason; if she
preserve the one, my conviction is that she will
regain the other. That seeming antipathy to
yourself is a good omen. You are inseparably
associated with her intellectual world; in
proportion as she revives to it, must become vivid
and powerful the reminiscences of the shock that
annulled, for a time, that world to her. So I
welcome, rather than fear, the over susceptibility
of the awakening senses to external sights and
sounds. A few days will decide if I am right.
In this climate the progress of acute maladies
is swift, but the recovery from them is yet more
startlingly rapid. Wait—endure—be prepared
to submit to the will of Heaven; but do not
despond of its mercy."

I rushed away from the consoler—away into
the thick of the forests, the heart of the solitude.
All around me, there, was joyous with life; the
locusts sang amidst the herbage; the cranes
gambolled on the banks of the creek; the
squirrel-like opossums frolicked on the feathery
boughs. "And what," said I to myself—"what
if that which seems so fabulous in the distant
being, whose existence has bewitched my own,
be substantially true? What if to some potent
medicament Margrave owes his glorious vitality,
his radiant youth? Oh! that I had not so
disdainfully turned away from his hinted solicitations
—to what?—to nothing guiltier than lawful
experiment. Had I been less devoted a bigot to
this vain schoolcraft, which we call the Medical
Art, and which, alone in this age of science, has
made no perceptible progress since the days of
its earliest teachers—had I said in the true
humility of genuine knowledge, 'these alchemists
were men of genius and thought; we owe to
them nearly all the grand hints of our chemical
science—is it likely that they would have been
wholly drivellers and idiots in the one faith they
clung to the most?'—had I said that, I might
now have no fear of losing my Lilian. Why,
after all, should there not be in Nature one
primary essence, one master substance, in which
is stored the specific nutriment of life?"

Thus incoherently muttering to the woods
what my pride of reason would not have suffered
me gravely to say to my fellow-men, I fatigued
my tormented spirits into a gloomy calm, and
mechanically retraced my steps at the decline of
day. I seated myself at the door of my solitary
log-hut, leaning my cheek upon my hand, and
musing. Wearily I looked up, roused by a
discord of clattering hoofs and lumbering wheels
on the hollow-sounding grass track. A crazy,
groaning vehicle, drawn by four horses, emerged
from the copse of gum-trees—fast, fast along
the road, which no such pompous vehicle had
traversed since that which had borne me—
luxurious satrap for an early colonist—to my lodge
in the wilderness. What emigrant rich enough
to squander, in the hire of such an equipage,
more than its cost in England, could thus be
entering on my waste domain? An ominous
thrill shot through me.

The driver—perhaps some broken-down son
of luxury in the Old World, fit for nothing in
the New World but to ply for hire, the task
that might have led to his ruin when plied in
sport—stopped at the door of my hut, and called
out, "Friend, is not this the great Fenwick
Section, and is not yonder long pile of building
the Master's house?"

Before I could answer I heard a faint voice,
within the vehicle, speaking to the driver; the
last nodded, descended from, his seat, opened
the carriage-door, and offered his arm to a man,
who, waving aside the proffered aid, descended
slowly and feebly; paused a moment as if for
breath, and then, leaning on his staff, walked
from the road, across the sward rank with
luxuriant herbage, through the little gate in
the new-set fragrant wattle-fence, wearily,
languidly, halting often, till he stood facing me,
leaning both wan emaciated hands upon his
staff, and his meagre form shrinking deep within
the folds of a cloak lined thick with costly
sables. His face was sharp, his complexion of
a livid yellow, his eyes shone out from their
hollowed orbits, unnaturally enlarged and fatally
bright. Thus, in ghastly contrast to his former
splendour of youth and opulence of life,
Margrave stood before me.

"I come to you," said Margrave, in accents
hoarse and broken, "from the shores of the
East. Give me shelter and rest. I have that
to say which will more than repay you."

Whatever, till that moment, my hate and my
fear of this unexpected visitant, hate would
have been inhumanity, fear a meanness—
conceived for a creature so awfully stricken down.

Silently, involuntarily, I led him into the
house. There he rested a few minutes, with
closed eyes and painful gasps for breath.
Meanwhile, the driver brought from the carriage a
travelling-bag and a small wooden chest or
coffer, strongly banded with iron clamps.
Margrave, looking up as the man drew near,
exclaimed fiercely, "Who told you to touch that
chest? How dare you? Take it from that
man, Fenwick! Place it here—here, by my
side!"

I took the chest from the driver, whose rising
anger at being so imperiously rated in the land
of democratic equality, was appeased by the
gold which Margrave lavishly flung to him.

"Take care of the poor gentleman, squire,"
he whispered to me, in the spontaneous impulse
of gratitude, "I fear he will not trouble you