the nurse.

I would have passed her with a formal bow, but she stopped me.

"I came to inquire after poor Miss Brabazon," said she.

"You can tell me more than the servants can: is there no hope?"

"Let the nurse go up and watch beside her. She may pass away in the
sleep into which she has fallen."

"Allen Fenwick, I must speak with you--nay, but for a few minutes. I
hear that you leave L---- to-morrow. It is scarcely among the chances
of life that we should meet again." While thus saying, she drew me along
the lawn down the path that led towards her own home. "I wish," said
she, earnestly, "that you could part with a kindlier feeling towards me;
but I can scarcely expect it. Could I put myself in your place, and be
moved by your feelings, I know that I should be implacable; but I--"

"But you, madam, are The World! and the World governs itself, and
dictates to others, by laws which seem harsh to those who ask from its
favour the services which the World cannot tender, for the World admits
favourites, but ignores friends. You did but act to me as the World ever
acts to those who mistake its favour for its friendship."

"It is true," said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt candour; and we continued to
walk on silently. At length she said abruptly, "But do you not rashly
deprive yourself of your only consolation in sorrow? When the heart
suffers, does your skill admit any remedy like occupation to the mind?
Yet you abandon that occupation to which your mind is most accustomed;
you desert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the race, from
the fame which awaits at the goal; you go back from civilization itself,
and dream that all your intellectual cravings can find content in the
life of a herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild! No, you will repent,
for you are untrue to your mind!"

"I am sick of the word 'mind'!" said I, bitterly. And therewith I
relapsed into musing.

The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence in the unravelled Sibyl
Book of Nature were mysteries strange to every man's normal practice
of thought, even if reducible to the fraudulent impressions of outward
sense; for illusions in a brain otherwise healthy suggest problems in
our human organization which the colleges that record them rather guess
at than solve. But the blow which had shattered my life had been dealt
by the hand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic enchantments. Motives
the most commonplace and paltry, suggested to a brain as triv