Astra looked at him with soft, smiling, amused eyes. "Heartfree! As much as I am," said she. Doctor Remy gave her a questioning look. "I am not going to tell you anything about it," said she, laughingly. "Use your eyes, sometimes, in watching your neighbors, as I do." "Who _is_ my neighbor?" asked Doctor Remy, smiling. "The proper question!" laughed Astra. "In this case, you need not journey beyond this roof, to find him." Doctor Remy's eyes lit with a sudden, strange gleam. "Do you _know_ it is so?" he asked, quickly. "Ho, I cannot quite say that;--I doubt if she knows it herself yet. But I believe it, all the same." Doctor Remy watched her absently for some moments, then made a few curt, critical remarks about her work, bade her a cool good morning, and withdrew. Astra looked after him, with a troubled, wondering expression. "What has come over him?" she asked herself. "How have I offended him? Or was it only my fancy that he seemed so cold and strange?" Before Doctor Remy began his professional rounds, that morning, he had sketched, in outline, the main features of a new plan for the acquisition of Bergan Hall. The minor details he wisely left to the suggestions of time and circumstance. One of these proved to be very close at hand. As he drove mechanically through the principal street of Berganton, revolving various probabilities and possibilities in his mind, and trying to make some provision for each, he espied Miss Ferrars coming up the sidewalk,--easily recognizable, at almost any distance, by her peculiarly mincing and swaying gait. In all similar encounters with the slightly faded maiden,--whom he shrewdly suspected of designs upon his bachelor liberty,--it had been his wont to slide swiftly past, with a low and deprecatory bow, suggestive of his deep regret that the urgency of his haste denied him the pleasure of stopping to inquire after her health. On this occasion, therefore, she was agreeably surprised to see him rein his horse up to the sidewalk, with the obvious intention of speaking to her. Perhaps her heart beat a little more quickly, as she stopped to listen. Apparently, however, he had nothing of more importance to communicate than a commonplace enough observation about the heat of the weather, and a friendly caution not to walk far in so fervid a sunshine as was flooding the town with its golden waves. Then, he gathered up his reins, as if to signify that his say was said, and he was ready to proceed. Nevertheless, he lingered a moment longer, to add, carelessly,-- "By the way, I ought to acknowledge that you were right, and I was wrong, the other day. It is not the first time that man's reason has had to admit the superior correctness, as well as quickness, of woman's intuition." Miss Ferrars looked both pleased and puzzled. "It is very good of you to say so," she answered, simpering;--"but really, I can't think what you allude to."