uneasiness to his mother's cottage, from which Susan's betrothed had lately departed to arrange matters for their speedy marriage. But how Lady Western's "near relation"--this man whom Mrs. Hilyard watched with an intense regard which looked like hatred, but might be dead love--could be connected with Lonsdale, or Susan, or himself, or the poor needlewoman in Back Grove Street, Vincent could not form the remotest idea. He stood growing more and more impatient by that dark closed door, which had once looked a gate of paradise--which, he felt in his heart, half-a-dozen words or a single smile could any day make again a gate of the paradise of fools to his bewildered feet--the steps of the unseen stranger within, and the quick breath of agitation from the watcher by his side, being the only sounds audible in the silence of the night. At last some restless movement he made disturbed Mrs. Hilyard in her watch. She left the door noiselessly and rapidly, and turned to recross the wet road. Vincent accompanied her without saying a word. The two walked along together half the length of Grange Lane without breaking silence, without even looking at each other, till they came to the large placid white lamp at Dr. Marjoribanks's gate, which cleared a little oasis of light out of the heart of the gloom. There she looked up at him with a face full of agitated life and motion--kindled eyes, elevated head, nostril and lips swelling with feelings which were totally undecipherable to Vincent; her whole aspect changed by an indescribable inspiration which awoke remnants of what might have been beauty in that thin, dark, middle-aged face. "You are surprised at me and my curiosity," she said, "and indeed you have good reason; but it is astonishing, when one is shut up in one's self and knows nobody, how excited one gets over the sudden apparition of a person one has known in the other world. Some people die two or three times in a lifetime, Mr. Vincent. There is a real transmigration of souls, or bodies, or both if you please. This is my third life I am going through at present. I knew that man, as I was saying, in the other world." "The world _does_ change strangely," said Vincent, who could not tell what to say; "but you put it very strongly--more strongly than I----"