you'd be so pleased! But you don't even make
the demonstrations that bare civility requires,
and I feel quite mortified. I had meant to go
everywhere this week, and had reckoned upon
you for the partner of all my little
dissipations."

"My dear Harty, I shall be delighted to go
with you everywhere; but on Thursday I can go
nowhere. My sister starts for Malta with her
husband at eight o'clock on Friday morning,
and I must spend the last evening with her.
Besides, this last week I have given myself
a sickener of music, and just at the present
moment feel very much as if I would rather
never hear another note as long as I live.
Last Monday, I went as you know to that
ill-fated place we were at to-night." Here
Mrs. Brande burst out laughing, but on looking
round at him, saw with surprise that he was
perfectly serious. "On Tuesday I was at the
Vocal Association— on Wednesday there was
Benedict's concert— on Thursday I went to
Henry Leslie's Choir— on Friday there was the
Israel in Egypt at Exeter Hall— and on Saturday
I was at Covent Garden. I can't go to any
more music!"

"But, my dear Edward, what could induce
you to go to these places in such frightfully
quick succession?"

"Medusa," he said, with a nervous little
laugh. She pressed him in vain for an explanation;
she could get nothing further out of him.
As he was bidding her good night, she kept
hold of his hand, and said to him:

"Tell me who Medusa is?"

"Only a woman with grey worsted stockings,
and a checked shawl," he answered, and left her.

CHAPTER III.

EDWARD SAVILLE had passed a feverish
unsatisfactory week; haunted by the strange face
he had seen at the concert, he had (as he
told his cousin) gone by turns to every
musical entertainment in London, for the chance
of meeting that pale lady again. Everything
about her seemed mysterious. That she was
foreign he had no doubt, most probably German,
he thought, as he recollected the circumstance
of the knitting; and then he passionately
regretted that this should not have occurred to
him at the time. He had lived for years in
Germany, and the language was as familiar to
him as his own; if he had spoken to her in
German, perhaps she might have answered him.
At last, exasperated by all these unsuccessful
efforts to see her again, worried by recollections
he could not banish, and speculations that
arrived at no conclusions, in a sort of spite at
himself he made up his mind to think that after
all she was probably only one of the many
foreign women of disreputable career, with
whom London is always teeming. Her costly
clothes looked like the thing enough— so did
her being there all alone— and then he
remembered that irreproachable distinction of
appearance, the quiet of her demeanour, and
the pale face and wistful eyes seemed to reproach
him for his thought. If Edward Saville had had
a profession, or an occupation of any sort, he
would not have been subject to this kind of
possession; but from a boy he had been his own
master; and as, owing to his independent means,
he had had life pretty much his own way, and
had never met with anything like wholesome
opposition to any of his wishes, while he was blase
upon all the ordinary pursuits and pleasures of
most young men, he was capable of being
roused to an almost insane degree of excitement
by any adventure which seemed attended with
doubt or difficulty. However, continual
concerts had somewhat damped his ardour; and
at the end of this week of disappointment,
provoked with his want of success, he thought
himself a fool for his pains, and made up his
mind that nothing should induce him to pursue
his wild-goose chase any further; and so he
devoted himself very thoroughly to his cousin,
and took her to all the places she wished to go to,
except to Leslie's Choir; it would have brought
his recent disappointment too vividly before his
eyes; besides, he was engaged to his sister,
and, as we have seen, he refused to accompany
Mrs. Brande there. On Friday, when he was
calling, he asked her how she had liked her
evening.

"Quite charming," she said; " we had all
manner of lovely things, and then wound up
with Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, which I had
never heard before. I never liked anything so
much in my life, though I am free to confess that
during the last chorus I only listened with half an
ear to the music, for I suddenly caught sight of
a face so unlike any face I ever saw before, and
that looked so curious altogether, that I could
not take my eyes off it."

"Yes," said her cousin, absently, "one does
see such faces sometimes."

"I am sure," she went on, "there must be a
story to that face. Edward, don't you believe
that when people look like that, they have
stories? I haven't a story, and I don't look
like that; you haven't a story, and you don't
look like that; don't tell me that people look
like that for nothing."

"Like what, in the first place?" he asked,
laughing. "And, in the second, did the face
belong to a man or a woman? for you haven't
told me even that yet. I dare say it's the man
with the big red beard, whom one sees
everywhere— you always go mad upon beards."

"It was a woman," said Harty, impetuously;
"and the only thing in the world she was like,
was an ecstatic triumphant Virgin, in an Assumption
by some glorious old master. She was
just two rows behind me, and when I first
caught sight of her, she was leaning back with
her hands clasped in her lap, her face was
turned upwards towards the orchestra, and had
a rapturous transfigured aspect, such as I never
saw on any human face before. And oh, what
eyes! It was not only the beauty of them, but a
look they had in them, as if all the time they saw
something that we none of us could see. It