“What’s the matter?” he asked.  “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Of what?”

“The Prince of Darkness.”

“The devil lives a little behind us.”

“In you, too, then?”

“In Rash.  Look at him; he is bigger than Faust’s dog, jumps higher, and is blacker.  You can’t hear the least sound from him as he gambols with his familiar.”

We left the last regular street on that side of the city, and entered a road, bordered by trees and bushes, which hid the country from us.  We crept through a gap in it, crossed two or three spongy fields, and ascended a hill, reaching an abrupt edge of the rocks, over whose earthy crest we walked.  Below it I saw a strip of the sea, hemmed in on all sides, for the light was too vague for me to see its narrow outlet.  It looked milky, misty, and uncertain; the predominant shores stifled its voice, if it ever had one.  Adelaide and Ann crouched over the edge of the rock, reciting, in a chanting tone, from a poem beginning: 

  “The river of thy thoughts must keep
  its solemn course too still and deep
  For idle eyes to see.”

Their false intonation of voice and the wordy spirit of the poem convinced me that poetry with them was an artificial taste.  I turned away.  The dark earth and the rolling sky were better.  Ben followed.

“I hope Veronica’s letter will come to-morrow,” he said with a groan.

“Veronica!  Why Veronica?”

“Don’t torment me.”

“She writes letters seldom.”

“I have written her.”

“She has never written me.”

“It might be the means of revealing you to each other to do so.”

“Ben, your native air is deleterious.”

“You laugh.  I feel what you say.  I do not attempt to play the missionary at home, for my field is not here.”

“You were wise not to bring Veronica, I see already.”

“She would see what I hate myself for.”

“One may venture farther with a friend than a lover.”

“I thought that you might understand the results of my associations.  Curse them all!  Come, girls, we must go back.”

CHAPTER XXX.

I took a cold that night.  Belem was damp always, but its midnight damp was worse than any other.  Mrs. Somers sent me medicine.  Adelaide asked me, with an air of contemplation, what made me sick, and felt her own pulse.  Ann criticised my nightgown ruffles, and accused me of wearing imitation lace; but nursing was her forte, and she stayed by me, annoying me by a frequent beating up of my pillow, and the bringing in of bowls of strange mixtures for me to swallow, which she persuaded the cook to make and her father to taste.

Before I left my room, Mrs. Somers came to see me.

“You are about well, I hear,” she said, in a cold voice.

I felt as if I had been shamming sickness.