Poor Rosalind was as little sure as any imaginative girl could be; she, too, was very much shaken by Johnny’s vision; at her age it is so much more easy to believe in the supernatural than in spectral illusions or derangement of the digestion. She did not believe that the stomach was the source of fancy, or that imagination only meant a form of suppressed gout. Her nerves were greatly disturbed, and she was as ready to see anything, if seeing depended upon an excited condition, as any young and impressionable person ever was. She was glad to soothe Mrs. Lennox with an easy explanation. But Rosalind did not believe that it was the curtain which had deceived Johnny. Neither did she believe in the baths, or in the suppressed gout. She was convinced in her mind that the child spoke the truth, and that it was some visitor from the unseen who came to him. But who was it? Dark fears crossed her mind, and many a wistful wonder. There were no family warnings among the Trevanions, or it is to be feared that reason would have yielded in Rosalind’s mind to nature and faith. As it was, her heart grew feverish and expectant. The arrival of the letters from England every morning filled her with terror. She dreaded to see a black-bordered envelope, a messenger of death. CHAPTER XLVI. Johnny throve, notwithstanding his visions. He woke up in the morning altogether unaffected, so far as appeared, by what he saw at night. He had always been more or less the centre of interest, both by dint of being the only male member of the party and because he was the youngest, and he was more than ever the master of the situation now. He did not mind his baths, and he relished the importance of his position. So much time as Mrs. Lennox had free from her “cure” was entirely occupied with Johnny. She thought he wanted “nourishment” of various dainty kinds, to which the little fellow had not the least objection. Secretly in her heart Aunt Sophy was opposed to the idea of suppressed gout, and clung to that of impaired digestion. Delicate fricassees of chicken, game, the earliest products of _la chasse_, she ordered for him instead of the roast mutton of old. He had fine custards and tempting jellies, while Sophy and Amy ate their rice pudding; and in the intervals between his meals Aunt Sophy administered glasses of wine, cups of jelly, hunches of spongecake, to the boy. He took it all with the best grace in the world--and an appetite which it was a pleasure to see--and throve and grew, but nevertheless still saw the lady at intervals with a pertinacity which was most discouraging. It may be supposed that an incident so remarkable had not passed without notice in the curious little community of the hotel. And the first breath of it, whispered by nurse in the ear of some confidante, brought up the landlady from the bureau in a painful condition of excitement, first to inquire and then to implore that complete secrecy might be kept on the matter. Madame