'She glided away from my sight down the garden walk, quitting me with an abruptness unusual to her, which I observed on more than one occasion, and the cause of which I was unable to discover, or reconcile even with the rules of common politeness; but now she returned with a sad yet smiling and somewhat confused expression of face, and showed me the book she had been perusing on the preceding day. It was the Baron von Reichenbach's work on magnetism and vital force, and pointing to a passage wherein he details the effect produced on a girl of highly sensitive organization when influenced by a magnet, she said: '"I feel when I start and leave you exactly what this girl describes her sensation to be, drawn from you by an irresistible attraction which I am compelled to follow unconditionally and involuntarily, and which, while the power lasts, I am obliged to obey, even against my own will. So do pardon me, Jerry; I am powerless, and not to blame." 'She spoke with quiet sweetness--with an infinite gentleness and sadness, but I saw the man's glove yet lying in the arbour--the tangible glove--and thought: "Good heavens! is all this acting--insanity, or what?" 'Anyway, I was filled with keen anxiety and deep sorrow to find that she whom I loved so tenderly was under influences so strange and accountable--so far beyond one's grasp. 'Could the figure of the man I had seen so near her, with his odious face so close--so very close--to hers, have been an illusion--a hallucination--a thing born of my own heated fancy, and the shifting lights and shadows of the arbour and its foliage? 'If so, it seemed very odd indeed that an appearance exactly similar should have been seen in his conservatory by such a sentimental and matter-of-fact old fellow as Colonel Rakes!' Here ended Jerry's long and rambling letter, many items in which gave Trevor Chute food for long thought and reverie. As for Ida's nervous illness, for such he deemed it beyond a doubt to be--an illness born of her grief for Beverley, and annoyance at her father's marriage--he believed the bracing country air would cure all that; and as for her magnetic fancies, he thought that the less she read of such far-fetched philosophy as that of the Baron the better. The two stories of the man who had been seen were odd, certainly, and to some minds the bouquet, though alleged to be given by the gardener, and the glove might have seemed suspicious; but Ida, though she had jilted Jerry in time that was past, was not by nature a coquette; and knowing this, Trevor Chute, as a man of the world, dismissed the whole affair as some fancy or coincidence, and then his ideas went direct to Clare and Carnaby Court, and he envied Jerry.