ds
careless and impassioned in tone. It was in all this that he marked
the greatness of the change in her. The feverish warmth with which
she greeted him was of itself totally different from her old manner,
and from its being so different it seemed to him unnatural. On the
whole, this change struck him painfully, and she seemed to him rather
like one in a kind of delirium than one in her sober senses.

"When I last bade you good-by," said she, alluding in this very
delicate way to their parting at the hotel in Lausanne, "you assured
me that I would one day want your services. You were right. I was
mad. I have overcome my madness. I do want you, my friend--more than
ever in my life before. You are the only one who can assist me in
this emergency. You gave me six months, you remember, but they are
not nearly up. You understood my position better than I did."

She spoke in a series of rapid phrases, holding his hand the while,
and looking at him with burning intensity of gaze--a gaze which
Gualtier felt in his inmost soul, and which made his whole being
thrill. Yet that clasp of his hand and that gaze and those words did
not inspire him with any pleasant hope. They hardly seemed like the
acts or words of Hilda, they were all so unlike herself. Far
different from this was the Hilda whom he had known and loved so
long. That one was ever present in his mind, and had been for
years--her image was never absent. Through the years he had feasted
his soul in meditations upon her grand calm, her sublime self-poise,
her statuesque beauty, her superiority to all human weakness, whether
of love or of remorse. Even in those collisions into which she had
come with him she had risen in his estimation. At Chetwynde she had
shown some weakness, but in her attitude to him he had discovered and
had adored her demoniac beauty. At Lausanne she had been even
grander, for then she had defied his worst menaces, and driven him
utterly discomfited from her presence. Such was the Hilda of his
thoughts. He found her now changed from this, her lofty calm
transformed to feverish impatience, her domineering manner changed to
one of obsequiousness and flattery. The qualities which had once
excited his admiration appeared now to have given way to others
altogether commonplace. He had parted with her thinking of her as a
powerful demon, he came back to her finding her a weak woman.

But nothing in his manner showed his thoughts. Beneath all these lay
h