ntrive to enter my house in my absence; more prudent to guard in my
own watchful keeping the incomprehensible instrument of incomprehensible
arts. I resolved, therefore, to take the wand with me, and placed it
in my travelling-trunk, with such effects as I selected for use in the
excursion that was to commence with the morrow. I now lay down to rest,
but I could not sleep. The recollections of the painful interview with
Mrs. Poyntz became vivid and haunting. It was clear that the sentiment
she had conceived for me was that of no simple friendship,--something
more or something less, but certainly something else; and this
conviction brought before me that proud hard face, disturbed by a
pang wrestled against but not subdued, and that clear metallic voice,
troubled by the quiver of an emotion which, perhaps, she had never
analyzed to herself. I did not need her own assurance to know that this
sentiment was not to be confounded with a love which she would have
despised as a weakness and repelled as a crime; it was an inclination
of the intellect, not a passion of the heart. But still it admitted a
jealousy little less keen than that which has love for its cause,--so
true it is that jealousy is never absent where self-love is always
present. Certainly, it was no susceptibility of sober friendship which
had made the stern arbitress of a coterie ascribe to her interest in
me her pitiless judgment of Lilian. Strangely enough, with the image of
this archetype of conventional usages and the trite social life, came
that of the mysterious Margrave, surrounded by all the attributes with
which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy border-land that
lies beyond the chart of our visual world itself. By what link were
creatures so dissimilar riveted together in the metaphysical chain of
association? Both had entered into the record of my life when my life
admitted its own first romance of love. Through the aid of this cynical
schemer I had been made known to Lilian. At her house I had heard the
dark story of that Louis Grayle, with whom, in mocking spite of my
reason, conjectures, which that very reason must depose itself before
it could resolve into distempered fancies, identified the enigmatical
Margrave. And now both she, the representative of the formal world most
opposed to visionary creeds, and he, who gathered round him all the
terrors which haunt the realm of fable, stood united against me,--foes
with whom the intellect I h