The good old Doctor had to plead a negative.

“Well, no matter.  Elsie would have been burned for a witch in old times.  I have seen the girl look at Miss Darley when she had not the least idea of it, and all at once I would see her grow pale and moist, and sigh, and move round uneasily, and turn towards Elsie, and perhaps get up and go to her, or else have slight spasmodic movements that looked like hysterics;—­do you believe in the evil eye, Doctor?”

“Mr. Langdon,” the Doctor said, solemnly, “there are strange things about Elsie Venner,—­very strange things.  This was what I wanted to speak to you about.  Let me advise you all to be very patient with the girl, but also very careful.  Her love is not to be desired, and”—­he whispered softly—­“her hate is to be dreaded.  Do you think she has any special fancy for anybody else in the school besides Miss Darley?”

Mr. Bernard could not stand the old Doctor’s spectacled eyes without betraying a little of the feeling natural to a young man to whom a home question involving a possible sentiment is put suddenly.

“I have suspected,” he said,—­“I have had a kind of feeling—­that she—­Well, come, Doctor,—­I don’t know that there’s any use in disguising the matter,—­I have thought Elsie Venner had rather a fancy for somebody else,—­I mean myself.”

There was something so becoming in the blush with which the young man made this confession, and so manly, too, in the tone with which he spoke, so remote from any shallow vanity, such as young men who are incapable of love are apt to feel, when some loose tendril of a woman’s fancy which a chance wind has blown against them twines about them for the want of anything better, that the old Doctor looked at him admiringly, and could not help thinking that it was no wonder any young girl should be pleased with him.

“You are a man of nerve, Mr. Langdon?” said the Doctor.

“I thought so till very lately,” he replied.  “I am not easily frightened, but I don’t know but I might be bewitched or magnetized, or whatever it is when one is tied up and cannot move.  I think I can find nerve enough, however, if there is any special use you want to put it to.”

“Let me ask you one more question, Mr. Langdon.  Do you find yourself disposed to take a special interest in Elsie,—­to fall in love with her, in a word?  Pardon me, for I do not ask from curiosity, but a much more serious motive.”

“Elsie interests me,” said the young man, “interests me strangely.  She has a wild flavor in her character which is wholly different from that of any human creature I ever saw.  She has marks of genius,—­poetic or dramatic,—­I hardly know which.  She read a passage from Keats’s ‘Lamia’ the other day, in the school-room, in such a way that I declare to you I thought some of the girls would faint or go into fits.  Miss Darley got up and left the room, trembling all over.  Then I pity her, she is so lonely.  The girls