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which she might talk for ever afterwards; not to be frightened by the predictions of a foreign quack, who very likely knew a good deal more about a few rare and curious diseases than he did of English health and sanity.

Then, as the thought of his great name and his mysterious and astonishing successes overpowered her, reason and instinct effected a rapid compromise. His specialised acumen, she said to herself, had laid hold of some passing accidental symptom and exaggerated it . . . into an opinion which it was no less than an outrage to put into words. She had heard, she thought, of people wrongfully convicted of heart-disease through consulting a doctor just after running upstairs or something of the kind. She felt her own heart; it was beating fearfully. That was mere excitement; but she might as well ask a more detailed opinion. Le cœur,' she said huriedly, 'ai-je quelque mal là?' 'Oui, mademoiselle,' was the answer, 'c'est vrai . . .' and before she could put another question there was Lady Aubrey Valleson's foot on the stairs, her hand at the door. Resolved not to discuss such nonsense in public, Ida Houldsworth made her adieux quickly and coldly.

'You have not mentioned this to any one? Please never do so,' she said in a tone of icy contempt.

'No, mademoiselle; certainly not,' assented the doctor's voice, while his mind concluded a train of reflection almost as anxious as hers. 'Yes,' he mused, 'it was a great risk. . a great.responsibility either way . . . but it seemed he had done no harm. The girl had overrated her own fortitude a little, but that momentary pallor meant only physical fear.' With a sense of relief he watched her fine figure sweep from the room by a door opening on the front hall, while Lady Aubrey entered by the other.

'I have seen Miss Houldsworth,' said the pastor, holding out his hand to the old lady.

'Oh!' said the latter shortly-her usual manner of acknowledging the occurrence of any event not expressly designed and executed by herself-and continued, as if only anxious to anticipate possible information, I wish that she would change her way of life. She takes far too much exercise-golfing, riding, bicycling, tennis, all day and every day.'

'I can well believe it, madame,' said the doctor ambiguously. 'You told her so?' said the old lady, putting up her glasses.

'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.

6

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 un palatable 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 a 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

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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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with her. . . . That he was in love with her had been an unquestionable fact for a year past. The prominent consciousness of it in her own mind made even Lavergne's wondrous knowledge of it seem like the ordinary insight of an observant man. But Lavergne might know that fact, she said to herself—the man's presence in her thoughts—without really knowing that their two lives were in any mysterious way linked together. Besides ... had he said that they were ? The terror of the doom pronounced upon her had somehow driven out of her head the words immediately preceding it. In any case, she could not marry him, as she had said--as she had told Golightly himself—simply because she did not love him. There would have been nothing remarkable in her loving him-only, as a matter of fact, she did not. And why? The question seized hold of her in her present state with irresistible force. Why? ... Not for some preposterously inadequate reason? Not because the man, with his transcendent truthfulness, his lofty aims and heroic industry, had still about him some trivial flavour of harmless pedantry, some whiff of the scholastic lamp, that offended the country-bred taste inherited from her blue-blooded sporting forebears, something to which she herself was the natural antidote, which vanished before her presence ? No, indeed; that question answered itself.

Why, then, had she tortured him for so long? What was it that she had been vaguely looking for all this time? ...

A fairy prince-a good-looking young nincompoop with a title and, say, 35,0001. a year, who would provide a palace of delights, in which she with her practical mother-wit, her judgment of people—and of distances—her splendid physique, should be safely protected from contact with the actual, living, breathing world, and tread on air !

The amount of truth in the answer made her sick of herself. And the man who offered her the fullest scope for all her capacities for the struggle of life, whose existence her own little wealth would just brightly gild, who would welcome and worship her, she now saw, as a seabreeze and a glorious sunset are welcomed and worshipped by the brain weary of poring over miserable books'could she not love him ?

What hideous nonsense! Why, she did love him, with a spiritual enthusiasm no man had ever roused in her before an enthusiasm which there was really nothing to resist but her idle anxiety not to leave any of the pleasures of youth untasted before settling

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