“Not now, at least, Dr. Englehart.”

“Permit me, then, to feel your pulse vonce more.  I shall determine den more perfectly dis vexing subject of your sanity.”

“Thank you; I decline your opinion on a matter so little open to difference.  Be good enough to retire, Dr. Englehart.  Let me at least breathe freely in the solitude to which I am consigned.”

“I mean no offence, yonge lady,” he said, meekly, falling back to the centre-table on which was burning my shaded astral lamp—­for I had left it as he approached, instinctively to seek the protection of an interposing chair, on the back of which I stood leaning as I spoke.

He, too, remained standing, with one hand pressed firmly backward on the top of the table, in front of which he poised himself, gesticulating earnestly yet respectfully.

His position was an error of mistaken confidence in his own make-up, such as we see occur every day among those even long habituated to disguise.

As he stood I distinctly saw a line of light traced between his cheek and one of his bushy side-whiskers.

That line of light let in a flood of evidence.  The man was an impostor, a tool, as criminal as his employer—­not the footprint on the sand was more suggestive to Robinson Crusoe than that luminous streak to me, nor the cause of wilder conjecture.

Yet I betrayed nothing of my amazement I am convinced, for, after standing silently for a time and almost in a suppliant attitude before me, Dr. Englehart departed, and for many days I saw him not again.

An object that looked not unlike a small, solemn owl, stood in the middle of the floor, regarding me silently when I awoke very early on the following morning.

At a glance I recognized poor little Ernie, and singularly enough, he knew and remembered me at once.

“Ernie good boy now,” he said as he came toward me with his tiny claw extended.  “Lady got cake in pocket, give Ernie some?” Not only did he recall me, it was plain, but the incident that saved his life, and the rebukes he had received on the raft for his refusal to partake of briny biscuit, which no persuasion, it may be remembered, had availed to make him taste—­even when devoured by the pangs of hunger.  I tried in vain, however, to recall him to some remembrance of his poor mother.  On that point he was invulnerable; the abstract had no charm for him or meaning.  He dealt only in realities and presences.

A new element was infused into my solitude from this time.  In this child I lived, breathed, and had my being, until later events startled my individuality once more into its old currents of existence.  Not that I merged myself entirely in Ernie, sickly, wayward, fitful, ugly little mite that he was undeniably.  Nay, rather did I draw him forcibly into my own sphere of being and find nutrition in this novel element.

So grudgingly had Nature fulfilled her obligations in the case of this poor stunted infant, that, at two and a half years of age, he had not the usual complement of teeth due a child of eighteen months, and was suffering sorely from the pointing up of tardy stomach-teeth through ulcerated gums.