Encouraged by the satisfactory nature of the above information, Mr. Iglesias--shortly after his mother's death, now nearly eight years ago--had become a member of Mrs. Porcher's household. He had never, so far, had reason to regret that step. And it was with a consciousness of well-being and repose that he returned daily--after hours of strenuous work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking--to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in chimney-piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often goes along with these constitutes the burden and the offence. To-night, however, things were different. Material objects remained the same; but the conditions of existence had taken on a strange appearance, and with that appearance Iglesias was bound to reckon, being uncertain as yet whether it was destined to prove that of a friend or of an enemy. In furtherance of such reckoning, he had declined dining at the public table, in company with his hostess, Miss Eliza Hart, her devoted friend and companion, and the three gentlemen--Mr. de Courcy Smyth, Mr. Farge, and Mr. Worthington--who shared with him the hospitalities of Cedar Lodge. He had dined here, upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, had just finished clearing the table and departed. Usually under such circumstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite book from the carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small library; and, reading again that which he had often read before, would have found therein the satisfaction of friendship, along with the soothing influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's _Rome_--a handsome early edition in many volumes--_The Travels of Anacharsis_, Evelyn's _Diary_, Napier's _Peninsular War_, John Stuart Mill's _Logic_, Byron's _Poems_, nor those of Calderon, nor of that so-called "prodigy of nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and immortal _Don Quixote_ himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts, his own life, filled his whole horizon, leaving no space for the thoughts or lives of others. He found himself a prey to a certain mental incoherence, a bewildering activity of vision. More than once before in the course of his laborious, monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous life had this same thing happened to him--the tides of the obvious and accustomed suddenly receding and leaving him stranded, as on some barren sand-bank, uncertain whether the ship of his individual fate would lie there wind-swept and sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out and planks parted, disclosing the ribs of her in unsightly nakedness, or whether the kindly tide, rising, would float her off into blue water