of excitement, this step that was coming--falling dull and dead when the step was past, rousing up again to the next, feeling herself helpless, miserable, a slave to the anguish which dominated her, and against which reason itself could make no stand. Every morning she woke saying to herself that she would not allow herself to be so miserable again, and every night fell back into the clutches of this passion, which gripped at her and consumed her. When Herbert came in early and “like himself”--that is to say, with no traces of excitement or levity--the torture would stop in a moment, and a delicious repose would come over her soul; but next night it came back again the same as ever, and poor Reine’s struggles to keep mastery of herself were all in vain. There are hundreds of women who well know exactly how she felt, and what an absorbing fever it was which had seized upon her. She had more reason than she really knew for her fears, for Herbert was playing with his newly-acquired health in the rashest way, and though he was doing no great harm, had yet departed totally from that ideal which had been his, as well as his sister’s, but a short time before. He had lost altogether the tender gratitude of that moment when he thought he was being cured in a half miraculous, heavenly way, and when his first simple boyish thought was how good it became him to be, to prove the thankfulness of which his heart was full. He had forgotten now about being thankful. He was glad, delighted to be well, and half believed that he had some personal credit in it. He had “cheated the doctors”--it was not they who had cured him, but presumably something great and vigorous in himself which had triumphed over all difficulties; and now he had a right to enjoy himself in proportion to--what he began to think--the self-denial of past years. Both the brother and sister had very much fallen off from that state of elevation above the world which had been temporarily theirs in that wonderful moment at Kandersteg; and they had begun to feel the effect of those drawbacks which every great change brings with it, even when the change is altogether blessed, and has been looked forward to with hope for years.