vague mournfulness, blending into one, irresistible fascination. No doubt, Astra had been made to feel it still more keenly; no doubt, too, she had been led to believe that whatever was amiss in the doctor's beliefs would yield readily to her influence,--that he would prove scarcely less plastic in her hands than the clay wherewith she was wont to deal so cunningly. Yet Bergan could not help wondering a little at the doctor's ready success. Astra's genius, he thought, should have saved her from any hasty bestowal of her affections. He did not know that, in this regard, a woman of genius differs little from the most commonplace of her sisters. She gives her affections as trustfully, and flings herself away as freely, as the silliest of them all. Having gotten to this point in his meditations, and also to the middle of the open field, back of the garden, Bergan could not help turning and looking toward the thicket, the neighborhood of which he had so hastily quitted. His face grew troubled and anxious, as he gazed. Was Doctor Remy anywise worthy of the heart that he had won? Bergan shook his head ruefully, as he asked himself this question. Without intent or wish of his own--in spite, even, of some strenuous efforts to the contrary--a deep distrust of the doctor had rooted itself in his mind. Though it gave but scanty justification of itself to his intellect, and was not allowed to show itself in his actions; though, now and then, he made a sturdy effort to uproot it, and cast it out, as an ungenerous return for kindness, or something that looked like it; it, nevertheless, kept its ground, and quietly strengthened itself there. It did not fail, now, to thrust itself into view, as a partial answer to his question. The bright spring landscape, with its crowded leaf and bloom, and its rich promise of fruit, seemed to darken with a shadow from Astra's future, as thus revealed to him. Must the promise of seed-time and harvest fail, then, only in the moral world? Though Bergan, driven by a nice sense of honor, had fled so precipitately from the voices and the neighborhood of the lovers, there is no reason why the reader may not return thither, and see what is to be learned from their conversation. "I cannot think it right," said Astra, "to leave mother in ignorance any longer." "Do you think, then," asked Doctor Remy, reproachfully, "that I would ask you to do anything wrong?" Astra hesitated for a moment. Perhaps it then and there occurred to her, for the first time, that the doctor's standard of right was likely to differ from her own, in the same ratio as his religious faith. Doctor Remy did not wait for the tardy answer. Putting his arm round Astra, he drew her head on to his shoulder. The movement might have been prompted by tenderness; none the less, it had the effect to take his face out of her line of vision.