lage, namely Isobel Blake.

Isobel went to Mexico with her uncle and there had a most interesting
time. She studied Aztec history with her usual thoroughness; so well,
indeed, that she became a recognised authority on the subject. She
climbed Popocatepetl, the mysterious "Sleeping Woman" that overhands
the ancient town, and looked into its crater. Greatly daring, she even
visited Yucatan and saw some of the pre-Aztec remains. For this
adventure she paid with an attack of fever which never quite left her
system. Indeed, that fever had a peculiar effect upon her, which may
have been physical or something else. Isobel's fault, or rather
characteristic, as the reader may have gathered, was that she built too
much upon the material side of things. What she saw, what she knew,
what her body told her, what the recorded experience of the world
taught--these were real; all the rest, to her, was phantasy or
imagination. She kept her feet upon the solid ground of fact, and left
all else to dreamers; or, as she would have expressed it, to the
victims of superstition inherited or acquired.

Well, something happened to her at the crisis of that fever, which was
sharp, and took her on her return from Yucatan, at a horrible port
called Frontera, where there were palm trees and _zopilotes_--a kind of
vile American vulture--which sat silently on the verandah outside her
door in the dreadful little hotel built upon piles in the mud of the
great river, and mosquitoes by the ten million, and sleepy-eyed,
crushed-looking Indians, and horrible halfbreeds, and everything else
which suggests an earthly hell, except the glorious sunshine.

Of a sudden, when she was at her worst, all the materiality--if there
be such a word--which circumstances and innate tendency had woven about
her as a garment, seemed to melt away, and she became aware of
something vast in which she floated like an insect in the
atmosphere--some surrounding sea which she could neither measure nor
travel.

She knew that she was not merely Isobel Blake, but a part of the
universe in its largest sense, and that the universe expressed itself
in miniature within her soul. She knew that ever since it had been, she
was, and that while it existed she would endure. This imagination or
inspiration, whichever it may have been, went no further than that, and
afterwards she set it down to delirium, or to the exaltation that often
accompanies fever. Still, it left a mark upon her, openi