cally.

'I cannot tell,' replied Mrs. Lodge, shaking her head. 'One night when I
was sound asleep, dreaming I was away in some strange place, a pain
suddenly shot into my arm there, and was so keen as to awaken me. I must
have struck it in the daytime, I suppose, though I don't remember doing
so.' She added, laughing, 'I tell my dear husband that it looks just as
if he had flown into a rage and struck me there. O, I daresay it will
soon disappear.'

'Ha, ha! Yes . . . On what night did it come?'

Mrs. Lodge considered, and said it would be a fortnight ago on the
morrow. 'When I awoke I could not remember where I was,' she added,
'till the clock striking two reminded me.'

She had named the night and the hour of Rhoda's spectral encounter, and
Brook felt like a guilty thing. The artless disclosure startled her; she
did not reason on the freaks of coincidence; and all the scenery of that
ghastly night returned with double vividness to her mind.

'O, can it be,' she said to herself, when her visitor had departed, 'that
I exercise a malignant power over people against my own will?' She knew
that she had been slily called a witch since her fall; but never having
understood why that particular stigma had been attached to her, it had
passed disregarded. Could this be the explanation, and had such things
as this ever happened before?

CHAPTER IV--A SUGGESTION

The summer drew on, and Rhoda Brook almost dreaded to meet Mrs. Lodge
again, notwithstanding that her feeling for the young wife amounted well-
nigh to affection. Something in her own individuality seemed to convict
Rhoda of crime. Yet a fatality sometimes would direct the steps of the
latter to the outskirts of Holmstoke whenever she left her house for any
other purpose than her daily work; and hence it happened that their next
encounter was out of doors. Rhoda could not avoid the subject which had
so mystified her, and after the first few words she stammered, 'I hope
your--arm is well again, ma'am?' She had perceived with consternation
that Gertrude Lodge carried her left arm stiffly.

'No; it is not quite well. Indeed it is no better at all; it is rather
worse. It pains me dreadfully sometimes.'

'Perhaps you had better go to a doctor, ma'am.'

She replied that she had already seen a doctor. Her husband had insisted
upon her going to one. But the surgeon had not seemed to understand the
afflicted limb at all; he had told her to bathe i