forbid Mr. Kirke to say a word about it to you.
You are beginning a new life to-day—and the
only recollections I sanction, are recollections
five minutes old."

She looked at the doctor, and smiled. "I
must ask him one question," she said—and
turned back again to Kirke. "Is it true that
you had only seen me once, before you came to
this house?"

"Quite true!" He made the reply with a
sudden change of colour which she instantly
detected. Her brightening eyes looked at him
more earnestly than ever, as she put her next
question.

"How came you to remember me, after only
seeing me once?"

His hand unconsciously closed on hers, and
pressed it for the first time. He attempted to
answer, and hesitated at the first word. "I have
a good memory," he said at last—and suddenly
looked away from her, with a confusion so
strangely unlike his customary self-possession
of manner, that the doctor and the nurse both
noticed it.

Every nerve in her body felt that momentary
pressure of his hand, with the exquisite susceptibility
which accompanies the first faltering
advance on the way to health. She looked at his
changing colour, she listened to his hesitating
words, with every sensitive perception of her sex
and age, quickened to seize intuitively on the
truth. In the moment when he looked away
from her, she gently took her hand from him,
and turned her head aside on the pillow. "Can
it be?" she thought, with a flutter of delicious
fear at her heart, with a glow of delicious
confusion burning on her cheeks. "Can it be?"

The doctor made another sign to Kirke. He
understood it, and rose immediately. The
momentary discomposure in his face and manner
had both disappeared. He was satisfied in his
own mind that he had successfully kept his
secret, and in the relief of feeling that conviction,
he had become himself again.

"Good-by; till to-morrow," he said, as he left
the room.

"Good-by," she answered, softly, without
looking at him.

Mr. Merrick took the chair which Kirke had
resigned, and laid his hand on her pulse. "Just
what I feared," remarked the doctor; "too
quick by half."

She petulantly snatched away her wrist.
"Don't!" she said, shrinking from him. "Pray
don't touch me!"

Mr. Merrick good humouredly gave up his
place to the nurse. "I'll return in half an hour,"
he whispered; "and carry her back to bed.
Don't let her talk. Show her the pictures in the
newspaper, and keep her quiet in that way."

When the doctor returned, the nurse reported
that the newspaper had not been wanted. The
patient's conduct had been exemplary. She
had not been at all restless, and she had never
spoken a word.

The days passed; and the time grew longer and
longer which the doctor allowed her to spend in
the front room. She was soon able to dispense
with the bed on the sofa—she could be dressed,
and could sit up, supported by pillows, in an
arm-chair. Her hours of emancipation from the
bedroom, represented the great daily event of
her life. They were the hours she passed in
Kirke's society.

She had a double interest in him now—her
interest in the man whose protecting care had
saved her reason and her life; her interest in
the man whose heart's dearest and deepest
secret she had surprised. Little by little, they
grew as easy and familiar with each other as
old friends; little by little she presumed on
all her privileges, and wound her way unsuspected
into the most intimate knowledge of his
nature.

Her questions were endless. Everything that
he could tell her of himself and his life, she drew
from him delicately and insensibly: he, the least
self-conscious of mankind, became an egotist in
her dexterous hands. She found out his pride in
his ship, and practised on it without remorse.
She drew him into talking of the fine qualities
of the vessel, of the great things the vessel had
done in emergencies, as he had never in his life
talked yet to any living creature on shore. She
found him out in private seafaring anxieties and
unutterable seafaring exultations, which he had
kept a secret from his own mate. She watched
his kindling face with a  delicious sense of triumph
in adding fuel to the fire; she trapped him into
forgetting all considerations of time and place, and
striking as hearty a stroke on the rickety little
lodging-house table, in the fervour of his talk,
as if his hand had descended on the solid bulwark
of his ship. His confusion at the discovery of
his own forgetfulness, secretly delighted her:
she could have cried with pleasure, when he
penitently wondered what he could possibly
have been thinking of.

At other times, she drew him from dwelling
on the pleasures of his life, and led him into
talking of its perils—the perils of that jealous
mistress the sea, which had absorbed so much of
his existence, which had kept him so strangely
innocent and ignorant of the world on shore.
Twice he had been shipwrecked. Times
innumerable, he and all with him had been threatened
with death, and had escaped their doom by the
narrowness of a hair's breadth. He was always
unwilling, at the outset, to speak of this dark
and dreadful side of his life: it was only by
adroitly tempting him, by laying little snares for
him in his talk, that she lured him into telling her
of the terrors of the great deep. She sat listening
to him with a breathless interest, looking at
him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful
stories—made doubly vivid by the simple
language in which he told them—fell, one by one,
from his lips. His noble unconsciousness of his
own heroism—the artless modesty with which
he described his own acts of dauntless endurance
and devoted courage, without an idea that they
were anything more than plain acts of duty to
which he was bound by the vocation that he