"Then," returned Doctor Remy, with equal gravity, "it would be a kindly blast--though it might not seem so, at first--that should blow you all to some point where your genius could find fuller and freer development. If such an one should ever come to you, I hope you will be able to regard it as--what Miss Bergan would doubtless call a providence." Carice was looking towards them, now; and his last words were spoken with a smiling glance that was apparently meant to draw her into the conversation. "And what would Doctor Remy call it?" she asked, but without any answering smile. "Doctor Remy does not concern himself about names, but things," he replied, pleasantly. "Things answer to names," she rejoined, quickly; "and if Doctor Remy to call a providence a chance, for instance, let him not wonder if it prove a chance--to him." "I am afraid that I am wofully obtuse," returned the doctor, with the air of a man who asks for a further explanation. "From the hand of Chance," she answered briefly, "one gets little good, and much harm; from the hand of Providence, only good, however disguised. The difference is in the taking and the using." She turned towards the window as she finished, with the air of who dismisses the subject. Astra, meanwhile, stood gazing at the doctor with a most anxious, disturbed expression. She was beginning to understand too well that under many of his seemingly most careless utterances, there lurked a deep significance and design. In the tone of his last speech to her, there had been something which caused her a vague alarm. "What did he mean?" she asked herself, wearily putting her hand to her brow,--"What did he mean?" VII. OVERBURDENED. Carice Bergan was gifted with instincts singularly quick and delicate. She had not long breathed the same atmosphere with Astra and Doctor Remy before she felt it growing heavy around her with some intensity of emotion which she neither shared nor understood. It might be sympathy, it might be aversion; in either case, its effect was to make her feel confused and constrained, in their presence. At one moment, she seemed to behold them afar off, as it were, in a sphere of their own, whither she had neither the right nor the ability to follow them; at another, she felt herself standing between them, barring their way to a free and satisfactory interchange of thought and feeling; and again, she believed that Doctor Remy alone was responsible for her discomfort, interrupting, by his presence, the cordial flow of sympathy between Astra and herself. At any rate, it would be a relief to escape from so oppressive an atmosphere; accordingly, she took her departure, leaving the lovers--if such they can be called--together.