“Not necessarily your ruin,” said he; “no mortal knows the birth of the next moment.  The womb of fate is never empty; but no man shall dare to say what is in it till the issue of every moment proves itself.  Nor does all this take away hope, for hope is in the ancient decree, like all the other evolutions of time, including that hope’s being deferred till the heart grows sick; and,” he added, as he looked sorrowfully into her face, “that is the fate of mine, for, know you, Rachel Grierson, I have long loved you, and have now seen that the riches you are to inherit put you beyond the sphere of my ambition.  I have often wished—­pardon me Rachel—­yes, I have often wished you might be left a beggar, that I might have the privilege of using the invention with which I am gifted to astonish the world by my handiwork, and bring wealth to her I loved.”

“I am surrounded on all sides by difficulties,” sighed the young woman, as she seemed to find herself in the mazes of an unseen destiny.  As she looked at her cousin, she thought that one of her evils was that the capture of her affections so early by Walter had prevented her from viewing Paul in any other light than that of an ingenious artist, and a man of kindly sympathies, however much he was separated from mankind by a theory of the world too esoteric for ordinary thought, and which yet, at some time of man’s life, forces its way amidst palpitations of fear to every heart.

On reaching home she met there the notary, Mr. Ainslie, who informed her, probably at the request of her father (for information of that kind is seldom given gratuitously), that the will had been signed, and left in the possession of the old man.  Even this communication, so calculated to shake from the heart so many of the sorrows of life, had no greater effect upon her generous nature than to increase the responsibility of fulfilling the condition upon which the inheritance was to be received and held.  If she had not been under the effect of an early prepossession in favour of Walter, she might have doubted the sincerity of his statement, as it came from his own mouth.  Suspicion attached to every word of it; but after the communication made by Paul, it was scarcely possible for her to resist the conclusion that he had told her a falsehood, and that he was aiming at the fortune, without the power or the inclination to give her in return his love; nay, that he was heartlessly sacrificing to his passion for gold two parties—­the object of his real love, and that of his feigned.  Yet she did not resist that conclusion; and so good an analyst was she of her own mind, that even when in the very act of throwing away these suspicions of his honesty, she knew in her soul that her love was in successful conflict with an array of evidence establishing the fact which she disregarded.  Then the consciousness of this inability to cease loving the man whom she could hardly doubt to be a liar, as well as heartless and mercenary, brought up to her the strange theory