the idea pressed upon me that it was in some sort my duty to speak the name he meditated. Of course he was ready for the subject. I saw in his countenance a teeming plenitude of comment, question, and interest—a pressure of language and sentiment, only checked, I thought, by sense of embarrassment how to begin. To spare him this embarrassment was my best, indeed my sole use. I had but to utter the idol’s name, and love’s tender litany would flow out. I had just found a fitting phrase—“You know that Miss Fanshawe is gone on a tour with the Cholmondeleys”—and was opening my lips to speak it, when he scattered my plans by introducing another theme.

“The first thing this morning,” said he, putting his sentiment in his pocket, turning from the moon, and sitting down, “I went to the Rue Fossette, and told the cuisinière that you were safe and in good hands. Do you know that I actually found that she had not yet discovered your absence from the house? She thought you safe in the great dormitory. With what care you must have been waited on!”

“Oh! all that is very conceivable,” said I. “Goton could do nothing for me but bring me a little tisane and a crust of bread, and I had rejected both so often during the past week that the good woman got tired of useless journeys from the dwelling-house kitchen to the school dormitory, and only came once a day at noon to make my bed. Believe, however, that she is a good-natured creature, and would have been delighted to cook me côtelettes de mouton if I could have eaten them.”

“What did Madame Beck mean by leaving you alone?”

“Madame Beck could not foresee that I should fall ill.”

“Your nervous system bore a good share of the suffering?”

“I am not quite sure what my nervous system is, but I was dreadfully low-spirited.”

“Which disables me from helping you by pill or potion. Medicine can give nobody good spirits. My art halts at the threshold of hypochondria. She just looks in and sees a chamber of torture, but can neither say nor do much. Cheerful society would be of use. You should be as little alone as possible. You should take plenty of exercise.”

Acquiescence and a pause followed these remarks. They sounded all right, I thought, and bore the safe sanction of custom, and the well-worn stamp of use.

“Miss Snowe,” recommenced Dr. John—my health, nervous system included, being now, somewhat to my relief, discussed and done with—“is it permitted me to ask what your religion is? Are you a Catholic?”

I looked up in some surprise. “A Catholic! No! Why suggest such an idea?”

“The manner in which you were consigned to me last night made me doubt.”

‘I consigned to you? But indeed I forget. It yet remains for me to learn how I fell into your hands.”

“Why, under circumstances that puzzled me. I had been in attendance all day yesterday on a case of singularly interesting and critical character, the disease being rare and its treatment doubtful. I saw a similar and still finer case in a hospital in Paris—but that will not interest you. At last a mitigation of the patient’s most urgent symptoms (acute pain is one of its accompaniments) liberated me, and I set out homeward. My shortest way lay through the Basse-Ville; and as the night was excessively dark, wild, and wet, I took it. In riding past an old church belonging to a community of Béguines, I saw by a lamp burning over the porch or deep arch of the entrance a priest lifting some object in his arms. The lamp was bright enough to reveal the priest’s features clearly, and I recognized him. He was a man I have often met by the sick-beds of both rich and poor, and chiefly the latter. He is, I think, a good old man, far better than most of his class in this country—superior, indeed, in every way, better informed, as well