senses,
with all the wondrous resulting harmonies of speech, sound, and song.
Healing an 'unclean' wretch of his foul disorder ranks not the healthy
rhythm of an infant's pulse. The inexplicable life of an interesting
young girl is more mysterious than was the resurrection of Lazarus."

The ritual had an unspeakable charm for Esther and Oswald.

Monday, Oswald saw Esther only briefly, as some matters of household
supervision absorbed her care. He felt lonely, but improved the time in
writing several letters which had been delayed. Such employment would do
when Esther was out of sight. It seemed a day lost.

Many years had receded into vague retrospect before the absorbing
interests of three brief weeks.

Upon Tuesday Sir Donald and Esther drove to the station. A girl friend
was expected on a visit from London.

Oswald spent the day in walking about the grounds and viewing the rare
beauties of Northfield. Aware that much of interest was being seen by
him for the first time, yet he experienced a strange sense of
familiarity with many objects in this changing panorama. He took an
extended stroll along the banks of the lake. He stops and soliloquizes:
"Still the same unaccountable sensation! When and where have I witnessed
the counterpart of that timbered bank beyond the curve, with the jutting
wooded point in the distance? Why should the waters of a running stream,
with the glare of myriad lights, appear in the background of this real
landscape view? What have I done that a fleeing, skulking form like my
own flits back and forth in the distant outlines? Where have I seen that
despairing female face?"

With insistent sense of some fateful impending ill, Oswald returned to
Northfield.

Having been gone several hours, the sun was setting when he reached the
mansion grounds. Coming up a flower-fringed path, wondering at the
chimeras of the afternoon, he saw Esther seated on a bench near a
rosebush, and stepped toward her with a pleasant greeting, but cut it
short with a startled, "Well!"

The surprised cause of Oswald's exclamation blushed as she looked into
his strangely excited countenance.

Thinking there was some mistake of identity at the base of this
incident, Esther presented Oswald to her friend from London, Miss Alice
Webster.

With much pleasant tact, Esther managed to divert the minds of her young
friends from this little mistaken affair to subjects more agreeable.

"Miss Webster has lived in London s