'I told her what I thought of her case,' said M. Lavergne quietly.

*Humph!' ejaculated Lady Aubrey; and mentally added, 'He has told the girl she is overdoing it, precisely as I have told her hundreds of times. Possibly she will believe it now.' A minute later both ladies were on their way back to England,

In most human natures where the animal is strongly developed there is a certain leaven of superstition, certain unreasoned hopes and fears that are made and unmade by changes of temperament. But for this, Ida Houldsworth would have shaken off more easily the depression caused by the doctor's warning. As it was, she went off at once for her usual visit to a sporting uncle in Rutlandshire, defying both him and Lady Aubrey.

But a secret fear of some mysterious strain unconsciously effected by excessive gymnastics had visited her once or twice before. It was nonsense fussing about such things when she knew she was perfectly well and had such a splendid appetite. But it was a simple unpalatable fact that her nerve did fail her once or twice at fences, and that the last time she barely escaped what might have been a nasty accident.

There happened to be rather a number of accidents at the opening of that particular season, and an evening paper collected them in a cheerful column headed Victims of the Chase,' which enlarged upon the dangers of ladies riding to hounds.

Ida Houldsworth, who did not read the newspapers very regularly, was rather struck by the logic of that article (which Lady Aubrey had kindly sent her marked in blue chalk), and thought she would give up her five or six weeks in the shires for that season. After all, golf suited her better—and was not dangerous. In fact, she could drive as good a ball—and that in days when golf was not played by every body-as nine out of ten undergraduates. Great, then, was her disgust when at a critical moment in the ladies' handicap her oldest and most trusted club, after scooping up a shovelful of turf, sprang in two pieces at her feet. Bystanders said it was a really painful scene. The magnificent Ida Houldsworth in tears was a thing undreamed of.

A week or two later she began telling people she met (in manner which envious rivals said it had taken all that time to rehearse) that her 'eye' was somehow 'out' this term. The rest of the winter, it is to be feared, she moped, and probably, being a

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person of active habit of body, got out of condition ; for when a forward spring brought the earliest tennis-parties she was beaten in her first single set by a positively third-class player, and showed a little temper, of which she was properly ashamed afterwards. 'I could beat that girl with a battledore left-handed,' she said. But she played with her right and with a racquet—which seemed to have unusually large holes in it—and every one remarked that Ida Houldsworth had lost her form of last season.

Then one afternoon in April, on one of the solitary walks she had never been known to take before this time, she met some friends, who said simply, 'Ida, you're not looking at all well.? That night, after an explosion of tears, she struggled to bring herself to task--to settle accounts, as it were, with Fate. What could it all mean?

The problem kept her awake all night, and her maid found her in the morning with a hectic flush on her pale cheeks, in an unmistakable fever. This, then, she thought to herself, was what it meant. . People might be cured now and then in a sudden miraculous manner, but they did not usually die that way. They became ill first ... as she had become ill . . from neglecting some simple precaution ... from overheating or some other accident unnoticed at the time .... and they died -slowly and naturally, as she would die in a few months, or it might be weeks, while the rest of the world was preparing for the pageant of summer, and the nightingales were singing in the • backs.'

Magnificent people have commonly a certain amount of selfishness about them. They have to think of keeping up their own magnificence as a sort of spectacle due to the public, and thus sometimes forget their plain moral duty as private individuals. Ida Houldsworth was consumed for about a week by a purely selfish misery, which complicated what was otherwise an ordinary case of influenza, and at first alarmed her doctor and her relatives. Influenza,' he said, and an aunt of the patient imprudently repeated it in her hearing, 'is never to be trifled with. It brings out any latent weakness in the system.'

Actually deposited on a sick-bed, with all the disadvantages of one who had scarcely known a twinge of suffering in her life, she was at the mercy of the melancholy current of thought that had set in. Over her young life, oppressed by the novel sense of actual physical weakness, hung the dark cloud of Lavergne's prediction.

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In her first moments of hours of leisure, on the journey home, she had robustly scoffed the terror into a retired corner of her mind. To tell a young and healthy person like herself that she was about to die was to assume a miraculous gift of prophecyand this was not the age of miracles. . . . Was it not ? . . . The terror crept back easily, and seemed to smile pityingly upon her. What other words had the ordinary world applied to the score of cures wrought by the Swiss pastor ?-cases recorded in books, supported by abundant evidence. Not once, but a dozen times, he had read the past in the face of man and woman-had known it even without reading. Was it more wonderful to read the—the near future? Or suppose the prediction had merely meant the discovery of the germ of some disease. She was tired now of trying to explain it away. In the first place, he with his wondrous insight was sure to be right, quite as sure as the great London physicians who sentenced half a dozen patients every year to 'six months of hopeless existence. In the second, he would never have told her had it not been for her good. Was not his most wondrous gift, exhibited in two or three cases that were on the lips of all the world, that of ministering to the mind diseased'? Discerning her worldliness and frivolity, he had nobly dared to prepare her for an early death.

Under the shadow of it the things by which her life was so engrossed, the things which she could do and had been so much admired for doing, seemed suddenly to have become very small indeed; though, oddly enough (not that this affected her judgment), she seemed of late to have somehow lost her power of doing them. She even underrated the self-denial and real industry that had trained her hand and eye to so many games, the masculine courage that had so often carried her straight across country, the acute sense and humour that had made her society so valued by the nicest of men.

Then her mind reverted, not unnaturally, to Golightly. She had often thought of him, though they had not met for four or five months, and had heard that his health was improved and improving, if he would only not overwork himself. A German specialist, recommended by a friend in London, had done wonders for him in a few months; while in scholarship and reputation he was coming up the academic ladder hand over hand. On the whole, considering the difference in their conceptions of life so far, it was rather singular that he should ever have fallen in love

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physical danger . . . or it may be . . . something else. If I look close, if the subject is favourable, I can see what the disease, what the trouble is, though I cannot always remove it. Only the good God can do that. I can correct the diagnoses of other physicians by what is borne in-I cannot make them see how -upon my spiritual eye.'

Miss Houldsworth seemed to drink in his every word with intense sensational curiosity.

He stopped a moment, and smiled lightly, fearful of perhaps exciting a nervous temperament; then resumed quietly, 'It is a sort of picture-language, mademoiselle, like that which sometimes comes in dreams. The forms of certain evils translate themselves. The forms of people that are much in the patient's mind-why, I see them sometimes as clearly as he does.'

Ida Houldsworth's magnificent figure had shrunk somewhat, and she was sitting uneasily on the arm of a chair. But, being past the stage of affectation, her actual courage and animal spirits came to her aid.

'Well,' she said, buttoning one of her gloves, 'what do you see in me?'

For all answer, M. Lavergne sat himself down at a table in the middle of the room and crooked his feet inside the chair-legs, after a fashion once said to be characteristic of graduates of a certain university; then, folding his arms on his breast, he threw his head back with a peculiar movement, and gnawed the tail-end of a pen holder. Then he rose and stood by the side of the table, leaning upon it with one elbow, the hand supporting his head, while the forefinger impatiently tapped his forehead, and smiled up at her.

Miss Houldsworth smiled too, but her breath came in quick gusts, and her eyes opened wide.

'I could see him sitting there,' said the pastor, resuming his natural self, 'when first I saw you. I could see him rise and lean on his elbow. He does not smile often, not now. He is a hard worker, a scholar'-his glance seemed to sweep across her handsome face, bust, and muscular arms with a soupçon of contempt for a mere pleasure-hunting beauty. His hair, his

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trouble of hopeless love. He has asked a lady, a rich and clever lady, but a girl, a child, by the side of him '-Miss Houldsworth winced and rose from the arm of the chair-'to be his wife, and . . . and . . .'-he tapped the table carelessly with his fingertips—' she have refuse him; one does not know why. Perhaps she will not marry at all? Perhaps she thinks he is a bad man? . . . She looked deep into the grave kindly eyes of the seer. He was her physician, for the nonce, and old enough to be her father; why should she scruple to unbosom herself to him?-even if he did not divine already by his wondrous gift all that she could confide.

He is the best of men,' she burst out, almost petulantly, looking down and mechanically twisting her parasol, as if to bore a hole in the stone flooring, but I cannot marry him. I do not love him.'

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'Indeed,' answered the pastor, softly and sadly, looking at her with an expression of bitter regret, you are young, mademoiselle, and beautiful . . . and he loves you so . . . one hoped it might be possible.... If not He stopped, watching the girl's face, which was turned full upon his with eager anxious inquiry. 'If not,' she cried, do you mean? . . . tell me the worst.' 'The worst, mademoiselle, is not for him.'

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