are afraid of her, and she seems to have either a dislike or a fear of them.  They have all sorts of painful stories about her.  They give her a name that no human creature ought to bear.  They say she hides a mark on her neck by always wearing a necklace.  She is very graceful, you know, and they will have it that she can twist herself into all sorts of shapes, or tie herself in a knot, if she wants to.  There is not one of them that will look her in the eyes.  I pity the poor girl; but, Doctor, I do not love her.  I would risk my life for her, if it would do her any good, but it would be in cold blood.  If her hand touches mine, it is not a thrill of passion I feel running through me, but a very different emotion.  Oh, Doctor! there must be something in that creature’s blood that has killed the humanity in her.  God only knows the mystery that has blighted such a soul in so beautiful a body!  No, Doctor, I do not love the girl.”

“Mr. Langdon,” said the Doctor, “you are young, and I am old.  Let me talk to you with an old man’s privilege, as an adviser.  You have come to this country-town without suspicion, and you are moving in the midst of perils.  There is a mystery which I must not tell you now; but I may warn you.  Keep your eyes open and your heart shut.  If, through pitying that girl, you ever come to love her, you are lost.  If you deal carelessly with her, beware!  This is not all.  There are other eyes on you beside Elsie Venner’s.—­Do you go armed?”

“I do!” said Mr. Bernard,—­and he ‘put his hands up’ in the shape of fists, in such a way as to show that he was master of the natural weapons at any rate.

The Doctor could not help smiling.  But his face fell in an instant.

“You may want something more than those tools to work with.  Come with me into my sanctum.”

The Doctor led Mr. Bernard into a small room opening out of the study.  It was a place such as anybody but a medical man would shiver to enter.  There was the usual tall box with its bleached rattling tenant; there were jars in rows where “interesting cases” outlived the grief of widows and heirs in alcoholic immortality,—­for your “preparation-jar” is the true “monumentum aere perennius”; there were various semipossibilities of minute dimensions and unpromising developments; there were shining instruments of evil aspect, and grim plates on the walls, and on one shelf by itself, accursed and apart, coiled in a long cylinder of spirit, a huge crotalus, rough-scaled, flat-headed, variegated with dull bands, one of which partially encircled the neck like a collar,—­an awful wretch to look upon, with murder written all over him in horrid hieroglyphics.  Mr. Bernard’s look was riveted on this creature,—­not fascinated certainly, for its eyes looked like white beads, being clouded by the action of the spirits in which it had been long kept,—­but fixed by some indefinite sense of the renewal of a previous impression;—­everybody knows the feeling, with its suggestion of some past state of existence.  There was a scrap of paper on the jar with something written on it.  He was reaching up to read it when the Doctor touched him lightly.