“I'm going to see Uncle Matthew in August,” she said at last. “So I have heard. I'm going to Switzerland, so I shall not have the pleasure of meeting you. Do you know many people here?” The pointed banality of the question angered her. “Will you never have a kind word to say to me?” she flashed out in a quick undertone, then she turned and greeted the professor effusively. Thus, whatever wild, uncontrollable hopes were newly born at the first sight of him, they were frozen at once to death. She went home in a furious rage of humiliation. He was a man of ice and steel, an automaton equipped with an intellect, scarcely a man at all. She put an imperious end to her doubts. Roderick Usher called next day, and spoke as one inspired with lofty ideals. Before her fascinated vision he seemed to place realities where hitherto the void had yawned or shadows at the most had shimmered. Life stretched infinitely in front of her, a lush garden, fertile with a myriad beauties. Her expanding soul shone out of dewy eyes. All the blindness, all the weakness, all the deluded nobility of her nature, lay revealed, pathetically defenceless. It was Roderick's golden hour, when he knew that he had her at his mercy. He rose, flung out his arms in a passionate gesture. “Come to me, Ella. Our destinies demand it.” She too rose and faced him, her eyes shining like stars, and held out her hands. “Yes, I will come,” she said. Roderick went into the warm June sunshine, thrilled with triumph, holding his head high. He walked along heedless of direction, turned into Hans Place and completed an entire circuit of the gardens before he realised what he had done. He paused, to think of some destination. Then he laughed aloud. “Roderick, you must be in love,” he said to himself. A long struggle with fortune had rendered it a rare occurrence for Roderick not to be perfectly aware of what he was doing and of what he was about to do. But the victory had come sooner than he had anticipated, and his immediate scheme of life, was thrown into confusion. He turned to the right, and once in Sloane Street, wandered north and found himself again undetermined at the corner of the Brompton Road. The driver of a crawling hansom touched his hat inquiringly. It was a brand-new, summer season cab, with horse and driver well turned out, and it caught his fancy. He stood upon the step, looked east, looked west, up and down the surging thoroughfare. Then obeying a sudden impulse, he shouted laughingly an address over the hood of the cab,--“24 Weymouth Street.”