He now looked like a friend. That indescribable smile and sparkle were gone; those formidable arched curves of lip, nostril, eyebrow, were depressed; repose marked his attitude, attention sobered his aspect. Won to confidence, I told him exactly what I had seen. Ere now I had narrated to him the legend of the house, whiling away with that narrative an hour of a certain mild October afternoon, when he and I rode through Bois l’Etang.

He sat and thought, and while he thought we heard them all coming downstairs.

“Are they going to interrupt?” said he, glancing at the door with an annoyed expression.

“They will not come here,” I answered; for we were in the little salon where madame never sat in the evening, and where it was by mere chance that heat was still lingering in the stove. They passed the door and went on to the salle à manger.

“Now,” he pursued, “they will talk about thieves, burglars, and so on. Let them do so. Mind you say nothing, and keep your resolution of describing your nun to nobody. She may appear to you again. Don’t start.”

“You think, then,” I said, with secret horror, “she came out of my brain, and is now gone in there, and may glide out again at an hour and a day when I look not for her?”

“I think it a case of spectral illusion—I fear, following on and resulting from long-continued mental conflict.”

“O Dr. John, I shudder at the thought of being liable to such an illusion! It seemed so real. Is there no cure? no preventive?”

“Happiness is the cure; a cheerful mind the preventive. Cultivate both.”

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.

“Cultivate happiness!” I said briefly to the doctor. “Do you cultivate happiness? How do you manage?”

“I am a cheerful fellow by nature; and then ill-luck has never dogged me. Adversity gave me and my mother one passing scowl and brush, but we defied her or rather laughed at her, and she went by.”

“There is no cultivation in all this.”

“I do not give way to melancholy.”

“Yes. I have seen you subdued by that feeling.”

“About Ginevra Fanshawe—eh?”

“Did she not sometimes make you miserable?”

“Pooh! stuff! nonsense! You see I am better now.”

If a laughing eye with a lively light, and a face bright with beaming and healthy energy, could attest that he was better, better he certainly was.

“You do not look much amiss, or greatly out of condition,” I allowed.

“And why, Lucy, can’t you look and feel as I do—buoyant, courageous, and fit to defy all the nuns and flirts in Christendom? I would give gold on the spot just to see you snap your fingers. Try the manœuvre.”