“I have eschewed all the frivolity,” she said. “It is only now that I desire for others to taste sweetly of the fruits of my experience. I am like a nun wishing to dictate the high morality from her cell. The world passes before my window in review, and I applaud or condemn. Is it that I am to be accused of self-interest, of intrigue, because I would convert my hard-wrung knowledge to the profit of my fellows? Yet they pursue me with hate and menace. My reputation is the sport of calumny; my life hangs by a thread. I write to monseigneur, and he aggravates, while seeking to allay, my fears. I write to M. Fox, and he laugh politely in my face. My friends heere, that I thought, turn against me--Sir Gage; Madame Young, also, that is prejudice of that Mees Burrnee you all love so. And she is a tower of strength, the little Fannee--oh yes! but steef, like the tower there. That is the same wis you all. One must evaire conform to your tradeetions or you look asquint.” “I think you exaggerate the danger,” said Mr Sheridan soberly. “But whatever it be, here am I come down from London to your counsel and command.” Madame rose from her seat and rested her long fingers caressingly on the speaker’s shoulder. “_Mon chevalier, mon très cher ami_,” she said, some real emotion in her voice, “forrgeeve me. It would be good of you at any time; but now, now! The pretty bird, the sweet _rossignol_, that cried into the night and was hearkened of an angel! Ah! she has no longer of the desolation of the song that must hush itself weeping upon the heart!” She pressed her other hand to her bosom. Her companion leaned down a moment, his fingers shading his eyes. “The desolation!” he muttered. “Yes, yes; but for us now there is a deeper silence in the woods.” They spoke of his wife, who had died but a few months previously. Perhaps the great man had been as faithful to her as it was the fashion for men, great and little, to be in those days to their partners. At any rate, he had loved her to the end--in his own way. _A propos_ of which it may be recorded as richly characteristic of him how, while this same wife lay a-dying, he had been known to ease his heart of sorrow by scribbling verses to Pamela (then living in Bath), in whose beauty he had found, or professed to find, a reflection of his Delia’s old-time fairness. Now, fortuitously, the little sentimental passage was put an abrupt end to; for, as she leaned, madame all of a sudden started violently and uttered a staccato shriek. “_Le voilà_, the _triste_ dark stranger! He come again; he come always! You tell me now there is no purrepus in this devilish haunting?” She retreated, backing into the room, shrinking without the malignant focus of any stealthy glance directed at her from the road outside. Mr Sheridan jumped to his feet and looked from the window. Strolling past in the sunlight, with an air of studied preoccupation upon his face, strolled a melancholy young man of enigmatical aspect.