“I am sorry I terrified you,” said the soft voice at the fire-place. “Some people think I am a little mad at times. You came, I suppose, at one of the times--if some people are right. I admit that I am a visionary. My imagination runs away with me, and I say and do strange things. On those occasions, anybody who reminds me of that horrible Trial throws me back again into the past, and causes me unutterable nervous suffering. I am a very tender-hearted man. As the necessary consequence (in such a world as this), I am a miserable wretch. Accept my excuses. Come in, both of you. Come in and pity me.” A child would not have been frightened of him now. A child would have gone in and pitied him. The room was getting darker and darker. We could just see the crouching figure of Miserrimus Dexter at the expiring fire--and that was all. “Are we to have no light?” asked Mrs. Macallan. “And is this lady to see you, when the light comes, out of your chair?” He lifted something bright and metallic, hanging round his neck, and blew on it a series of shrill, trilling, bird-like notes. After an interval he was answered by a similar series of notes sounding faintly in some distant region of the house. “Ariel is coming,” he said. “Compose yourself, Mamma Macallan; Ariel with make me presentable to a lady’s eyes.” He hopped away on his hands into the darkness at the end of the room. “Wait a little,” said Mrs. Macallan, “and you will have another surprise--you will see the ‘delicate Ariel.’” We heard heavy footsteps in the circular room. “Ariel!” sighed Miserrimus Dexter out of the darkness, in his softest notes. To my astonishment the coarse, masculine voice of the cousin in the man’s hat--the Caliban’s, rather than the Ariel’s voice--answered, “Here!” “My chair, Ariel!” The person thus strangely misnamed drew aside the tapestry, so as to let in more light; then entered the room, pushing the wheeled chair before her. She stooped and lifted Miserrimus Dexter from the floor, like a child. Before she could put him into the chair, he sprang out of her arms with a little gleeful cry, and alighted on his seat, like a bird alighting on its perch! “The lamp,” said Miserrimus Dexter, “and the looking-glass.--Pardon me,” he added, addressing us, “for turning my back on you. You mustn’t see me until my hair is set to rights.--Ariel! the brush, the comb, and the perfumes!”