"Hush," said Mrs. Hilyard; "now you are absurd. I speak out of my own thoughts, as most persons do, and you, like all young people, make personal applications. How can I possibly know about them? I am not a fanciful woman, but there are some things that wake one's imagination. In such a dark night as this, with such wet gleams about the streets, when I think of people at a distance, I always think of something uncomfortable happening. Misfortune seems to lie in wait about those black corners. I think of women wandering along dismal solitary roads with babies in their shameful arms--and of dreadful messengers of evil approaching unconscious houses, and looking in at peaceful windows upon the comfort they are about to destroy; and I think," she continued, crossing the road so rapidly (they were now opposite Lady Western's house) that Vincent, who had not anticipated the movement, had to quicken his pace suddenly to keep up with her, "of evil creatures pondering in the dark vile schemes against the innocent----" Here she broke off all at once, and, looking up in Vincent's face with that gleam of secret mockery in her eyes and movement of her mouth to which he was accustomed, added, suddenly changing her tone, "Or of fine gentlemen, Mr. Vincent, profoundly bored with their own society, promenading in a dreary garden and smoking a disconsolate cigar. Look there!" The young minister, much startled and rather nervous, mechanically looked, as she bade him, through the little grated loophole in Lady Western's garden-door. He saw the lights shining in the windows, and a red spark moving about before the house, as, with a little shame for his undignified position, he withdrew his eyes from that point of vantage. But Mrs. Hilyard was moved by no such sentiment. She planted herself opposite the door, and, bending her head to the little grating, gazed long and steadfastly. In the deep silence of the night, standing with some uneasiness at her side, and not insensible to the fact that his position, if he were seen by anybody who knew him, would be rather absurd and slightly equivocal, Vincent heard the footsteps of the man inside, the fragrance of whose cigar faintly penetrated the damp air. The stranger was evidently walking up and down before the house in enjoyment of that luxury which the feminine arrangements of the young Dowager's household would not permit indoors; but the steady eagerness with which this strange woman gazed--the way in which she had managed to interweave Mrs. Vincent and pretty Susan at Lonsdale into the conversation--the suggestions of coming danger and evil with which her words had invested the very night, all heightened by the instinctive repugnance and alarm of which the young man had himself been conscious whenever he met the eye of Lady Western's companion--filled him with discomfort and dread. His mind, which had been lately too much occupied in his own concerns to think much of Susan, reverted now with sudden