'There was a time when I did not require even you, Ida, to do so for me,' he replied, mistaking, perhaps, her meaning, for he was oversensitive. 'That is all past and gone now; but in the same kind spirit may I not plead with you for one who was very dear to you once--poor Jerry Vane?' She coloured deeply, and then grew very pale again, and while the long lashes of her soft eyes dropped, she said: 'Do not speak of this again, Trevor--my heart is in Beverley's grave.' 'Yet,' he urged gently, 'a time may come----' 'It will never come.' 'Poor Jerry--as he loved you once, he loves you still. I hope, dear Ida, you pardon me for speaking of this to you.' 'I do from my heart, Trevor; but tell me, in the time that you have seen me--I mean since your return--have you not been struck by a certain strangeness of action about me?' 'I confess that I have.' 'I am conscious of it repeatedly,' she continued with a strange and sad smile. 'In the midst of an animated conversation, I have all at once perceived your thoughts to wander, an expression of alarm to creep over your face, a kind of shudder through your frame, and your hand to tremble.' 'It is so.' 'And this sudden emotion, Ida? 'Comes when I think of Beverley--or, rather, this emotion, which I can neither avert nor control, makes _me_ think of _him_ even when my thoughts have been elsewhere.' 'This is very strange,' said Trevor Chute, as some of what he deemed Beverley's 'wild speeches' came back to memory again. 'Strange indeed, Trevor; but morbid thoughts come over me, with the _thrill_ you have remarked, even in the sunshine and when with others, but more especially when I am alone; and there seems to be--oh, Trevor Chute, I know not how to phrase it, lest you think me absurd or eccentric,' she continued, while a wild, sad earnestness stole into her eyes, 'that there hovers near me, and unknown to all, a spirit--a something that is unseen and intangible.' 'This is but overheated fancy,' said Chute tenderly, and with commiseration; 'you should be alone as seldom as possible, and change of air and scene will cure you of all this gloom. On my return--if I should return to London--I shall hope to hear that you are, as you used to be, the bright and happy Ida of my own brighter and happier days.' And rising now, he lingered with Ida's hand in his, intent on departure, as his last orders to his valet had been to pack at once for France or Germany; and Tom Travers, a faithful fellow, whose discharge he had bought from the Guards, and who had been with him in India and everywhere else, was fully engaged on that duty by this time. 'But, dear Ida,' he said, 'dismiss as soon as you can these gloomy ideas from your mind, and cease to imagine that anything so unnatural, so repugnant to the fixed laws of nature, as aught hovering near you _unseen_, forcing you to think of Beverley, could exist.' 'I do not require to be forced to think of Beverley,' said she, with tender sadness.