"This way, ma'am," called Dr. Oleander, striding straight, to the kitchen; "we'll find a fire here, at least. It's worse than Greenland, this frigid-zone!" Mrs. Oleander sat before the blazing fire, plucking a fowl; Sally stood at the table, kneading dough. Both paused, with feminine exclamations, at sight of the doctor, and turned directly, with feminine curiosity, to stare at the woman. "How do, mother? How are you, Sally? Back again, you see, like the proverbial bad shilling! This is Mrs. Susan Sharpe, the nurse I promised to bring. How's our patient?" He turned anxiously to his mother. She took her eyes from Mrs. Sharpe to answer. "I don't know; she frightens me, Guy." "Frightens you!" growing very pale. "How? Is she so violent?" "No; it's the other way. She's so still; she's like one dead in life. She sits all day, and never moves nor speaks. She doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive, and she never sleeps, I believe; for, go into her room night or day, there you find her sitting wide awake." Dr. Oleander looked white with dismay. "Does she never speak?" he asked. "She never spoke to me but once, and that was to ask me who I was. When I told her I was your mother, she turned her back upon me, with the remark, 'He says I'm mad, and surely none but a mad-woman would look for mercy from a tiger's dam!' She has never spoken to me since." Dr. Oleander stood listening with a very gloomy face. Mrs. Sharpe, sitting warming herself before the fire, looked straight at it, with a blank, sallow face. "What do you find her doing mostly?" he asked, after awhile. "Sitting by the window, looking at the sea," answered his mother--"always that--with a face the color of snow." The gloom on the young man's face deepened. What if he should prove himself a prophet? What if this spirited, half-tamed thing should go melancholy mad? "I will go to her at once!" he exclaimed, starting up. "If she goes into a passion at sight of me, it will do her good. Anything is better than this death in life." He held out his hand for the key of the room upstairs. His mother handed it to him, and he strode out at once; and then Mrs. Oleander turned her regards upon the new nurse. Strangers were "sight for sair een" in that ghostly, deserted farmhouse. But the new nurse never looked at her; she sat with those impenetrable green glasses fixed steadfastly on the blazing fire. CHAPTER XIX. MISTRESS SUSAN SHARPE. Dr. Oleander was by no means a coward, yet it is safe to say his heart was bumping against his ribs, with a sensation that was near akin to fear, as he ascended the stairs. He was really infatuatedly in love with his fair-haired little enchantress, else he never had taken his late desperate step to win her; and now, having her completely in his power, it was rather hard to be threatened with her loss by melancholy madness.