came by degrees to chat pleasantly, the Doctor carefully leading the conversation. With Lady Endsleigh in the room, something of Sobieska's usual bearing gradually returned, as if the presence of a person over whom she was conscious. of intellectual superiority, and over whom she had been wont to exert much half-unconscious influence, restored her her strength.

Soon the lunch which had been ordered arrived, and under the Doctor's scientific explanations and warnings the invalid managed to eat it.

In a short time one of the daughters joined the party, and the conversation became more general and ordinary in its character. The oppression which had been weighing on more than one of the household gradually lifted off; and the weirdness of such abnormal matters as trance, and the unpleasant feelings caused by unaccountable eccentricities, began to wear away.

Septimus Tachbrook stayed more than an hour, excusing himself professionally on the ground that Miss Chlopicki's digestion required careful attention.

ex

It was to him a most curious time. Sobieska sat on the sofa, looking quisitely charming in the glow of returning health, and in the newly-gained freedom from an indefinable consciousness of some strange relation to the Doctor. She did not quite lose the sense of a singular rapport with regard to him, but the dread of unmaidenly nearness to him faded somewhat from her mind, being relegated as it were from her nerves as they grew serener to the more mysterious depths of her spirit.

On the Doctor she looked, or appeared to look, with the same eyes as of old, whenever he had seen her on the occasion of his friendly occasional calls upon Lady Endsleigh.

But ever and anon there seemed to him to be a subtle and novel element in her look, a kind of wooing, unrealised by her, and proceeding from the very depths of her unconsciousness. If her outward demeanour was ordinary and merely polite, this inward demeanour manifested itself by flashes of ineffable and extraordinary fascination.

By the time the Doctor departed, the

portions of his soul which were divided from those devoted to science, and were set apart for love, were filled to the utmost. His whole being for the hour seemed almost to forget science and its incredulities, and to live in love and its faiths.

As he returned home, through the avenue, after engaging to call again the morning following, his scientific voice said within him, "All smooth now, possibly, now that we have tranquillised the excessive maidenly self-consciousness and reproach." And all the while, through day and night, through work and dream, his love voice kept repeating, "An exquisite girl, a fascinating spirit, a magnetic miracle, an adorable woman."

Septimus Tachbrook called at the Hall often and often, at first professionally, and afterwards without that excuse.

Sobieska, being wooed in ordinary fashion, and not wooing as she seemed to see herself in the horror of a half-remembered dream, did not manifest more terror and reluctance than are usual with maidens who are truly wooed and truly won. The glances of ineffable fascination that at first

had flashed timidly from the deepest founts of her inner soul, gradually grew in volume, and seemed to come from less distant regions of her eyes, and to be glowing closer and closer to her lover.

And when the day came that, in manly, straightforward language, normal and unmystical, he told her that he loved her, she was able to make effable those ineffable gleams of her spirit, and to say in homely, mortal speech the little sweet word, Yes.

She married that learned physician, and the pair proceeded to enter that lovely palace of love that had appeared in her dreams to be her father's, but is in reality universal. Doctor Tachbrook had met with his fate.

"FLORIO.

CHAPTER III.

A MAGNETIC LADY.

See her eyes!

They look you through, they make you shrink and shudder;
Yet, for all that, they hold you close, and bind you

As loadstone steel. You cannot soon forget

Those eyes; they haunt you o' nights; they make you

wonder . . .

Eyes are they, or strange orient talismans

Set in a pretty woman's giddy head
To madden men ?"

-Old Play.

ADAM, when he married Lilith, must have felt rather perplexed as to how to manage her. So must the chivalrous gentleman who married Undine. So, questionless, do a great many persons of both sexes who have the ill luck to wed those whom they cannot understand. Doctor Septimus Tachbrook, however, was a man of unusual perspicacity; he had the gift of insight, which is the best gift of any doctor, moral or physical.

He