VERY slowly and wearily the days went on at the High Elms. Lord Hardcastle, now become an acknowledged inmate of the house, scarcely recognised himself in the life he was leading, so completely were his occupations and surroundings reversed. Habituated to the quiet monotony of a life of study, broken only by a yearly visit to London to attend the meetings of the various scientific societies of which he was a member, it was not the solitude of the house which jarred upon his nerves and feelings. He had from his earliest youth been accustomed to keep his impulses and passions well under control, and his highly nervous temperament had ever been perfectly balanced by his well cultivated reasoning powers. Under the trying circumstances through which he had passed, his health had not suffered in the slightest degree, and yet here was he, reasonable and self-contained as ever, in a state of nervous irritability for which he could not account. “It is an atmosphere of mystery that I am breathing,” he would say to himself, “at every turn something confronts me for which I am totally unprepared. Why, for instance, the inscription on Amy’s grave? and why is it that I, who loved her so truly and who held her cold and lifeless in my arms, have as yet no feeling of utter blank despair in my heart, but only some strong undefinable impulse which is for ever urging me on, on, on, in the search for the truth?” And the more he thought the more he wondered, until his brain became as it were sick and giddy with revolving so constantly round one centre. Mr. Warden, on his part, seemed to have settled down into the absolute quietude of a hopeless, aimless life. He had become altogether an old man in his ways and habits, and was leading the life of one who knows the future will have no good thing in store for him, and who therefore lives entirely in the memory of the past. About Mrs. Warden, and her illness and death, he would talk freely, but when once or twice Lord Hardcastle had purposely mentioned Amy’s name to him, he had either abruptly quitted the room or else so pointedly turned the conversation that another remark on the subject would have been impossible. “It cuts him to the heart even to hear me speak of her, and he must know she is never out of my mind,” thought Lord Hardcastle, as he looked across the library to where Mr. Warden was sitting with an open volume before him, but his eyes dreamily fixed on the window pane—his thoughts evidently far away.