and looked back over his shoulder with an impish curiosity horrible to see. “Have I run over them? Have I ground them to powder for presuming to intrude on me?” he said to himself. As the expression of this amiable doubt passed his lips his eyes lighted on us. His mind instantly veered back again to Shakespeare and King Lear. “Goneril and Regan!” he cried. “My two unnatural daughters, my she-devil children come to mock at me!” “Nothing of the sort,” said my mother-in-law, as quietly as if she were addressing a perfectly reasonable being. “I am your old friend, Mrs. Macallan; and I have brought Eustace Macallan’s second wife to see you.” The instant she pronounced those last words, “Eustace Macallan’s second wife,” the man in the chair sprang out of it with a shrill cry of horror, as if she had shot him. For one moment we saw a head and body in the air, absolutely deprived of the lower limbs. The moment after, the terrible creature touched the floor as lightly as a monkey, on his hands. The grotesque horror of the scene culminated in his hopping away on his hands, at a prodigious speed, until he reached the fire-place in the long room. There he crouched over the dying embers, shuddering and shivering, and muttering, “Oh, pity me, pity me!” dozens and dozens of times to himself. This was the man whose advice I had come to ask--who assistance I had confidently counted on in my hour of need. CHAPTER XXV. MISERRIMUS DEXTER--SECOND VIEW THOROUGHLY disheartened and disgusted, and (if I must honestly confess it) thoroughly frightened too, I whispered to Mrs. Macallan, “I was wrong, and you were right. Let us go.” The ears of Miserrimus Dexter must have been as sensitive as the ears of a dog. He heard me say, “Let us go.” “No!” he called out. “Bring Eustace Macallan’s second wife in here. I am a gentleman--I must apologize to her. I am a student of human character--I wish to see her.” The whole man appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. He spoke in the gentlest of voices, and he sighed hysterically when he had done, like a woman recovering from a burst of tears. Was it reviving courage or reviving curiosity? When Mrs. Macallan said to me, “The fit is over now; do you still wish to go away?” I answered, “No; I am ready to go in.” “Have you recovered your belief in him already?” asked my mother-in-law, in her mercilessly satirical way. “I have recovered from my terror of him,” I replied.