On this day, teeming with events, Dr Dee had been too closely engaged in parish duties to give heed to these love fancies, and even had he been ever so free to exercise his judgment in the matter, it is more than likely Rodolf would not have opened to him the proceedings then afoot.  He well knew that the Doctor yet bore no good-will to Kelly, and might possibly thwart his designs, to the undoing of any good purposed by the strange transactions that had already occurred; he resolved, therefore, to let this day pass, ere he opened his lips on the subject.  But how to while away the hours until evening was a most embarrassing problem.  Sleep he had tried, but he found no wish to repeat the experiment; reading was just then foreign to his humour; mathematics must, that day, go unstudied.  After beating time to at least a dozen strange metres, he hit upon the happy contrivance of writing a love-song, as a kind of expedient to restore the equilibrium.  He was rather unskilled at the work; but the pen becomes eloquent when the soul moves it.  We will, however, leave him at this thrifty employment, having no design, gentle reader, to make the occasion as wearisome to thee as to himself.  Having the power to annihilate both time and space, let us watch the round sun, as he threw his last look, that evening, on the scene of this marvellous history.  The old walls of the college, and the church tower, were invested with a gorgeous apparel of light, as though illumined for some gay festival, some season of rejoicing, when gladness shines out visibly in the shape of bonfires and torches.  But few moments elapsed, ere the love-sick youth was again admitted into the dark interior of the seer’s dwelling.

A voice whispered in his ear—­

“Not a word, hardly a breath, as thou wouldest thrive in thy pursuit.  There be spirits abroad, not of earth, nor air.  Be silent and discreet.”

A ray suddenly darted across the room.  Again the voice was at his ear:—­

“Hold thine eye to the crevice when the light enters, and mark well what thou beholdest.”

Again he saw his mistress, apparently in a vaulted chamber, lighted by a single lamp:  she sat as if anxious and disturbed, her cheek pale and flushed by turns, whilst her eye wandered hurriedly around the room.  Some one approached; it was the seer.  Rodolf heard him speak.

“Maiden, hast thou a lover?”

The sound seemed scarcely akin to that of human speech.  It rose heavily and deep, as from the charnel-house, as if the grim and cold jaws of the grave could utter a voice,—­the dreary echoes of the tomb!  The seer’s lips were motionless, whilst he thus continued in the same sepulchral tone.

“I know thou hast.  ’Tis here thy love would tend.”  He drew a richly-set miniature from his bosom.  It was mounted in so peculiar a fashion that Rodolf started back with the first emotion of surprise.  The miniature was his own; a gem newly from the artist, and which he had left, as he thought, in safe custody a short time ago.  The voice again whispered in his ear, “Beware.”