the very same thing in the strange lady.  There were the same dark eyes, the same long, pale face, even (as far as he could judge) the same shade in colour of the hair.  He would have thought little or nothing of this had it not been for the inexplicable and almost miraculous vanishing of the figure when there was absolutely nowhere for it to vanish to.  Austin knew nothing of such happenings; with all his reading he had never chanced to open a single book that dealt with phenomena of this class, much less any written by scientific and sober investigators, so that the entire subject was an undiscovered country to him.  Had he done so, his perplexity would not have been nearly so great, and very probably he might have recognised the fact of his own remarkable psychic powers.  Still, in spite of this disadvantage, the conviction was slowly but surely forcing itself upon his mind that the lady he had seen was no one but his own mother.  From this to a belief that it was she who had intervened to save both himself and his Aunt Charlotte from serious disasters was but a single step; and like Mary of old, in the presence of an even greater mystery, he revolved all these things silently in his heart.

It was during the period when he was occupied with this train of thought that another strange thing occurred.  One evening he strolled into the garden just as the sun was setting.  It was one of those lurid sunsets peculiar to autumn, which look like a distant conflagration obscured by a veil of smoke.  The western sky was aglow with a dull, murky crimson flecked by clouds of the deepest indigo, from behind which there seemed to shoot up luminous pulsations like the reflection of unseen flames.  The effect of this red, throbbing light upon the garden in which he stood was almost unearthly, something resembling that of an eclipse viewed through warm-coloured glass; beautiful in itself, yet abnormal, fantastic, suggestive of weird imaginings.  Austin, absorbed in contemplation, moved slowly through the shrubbery until he reached the lawn; then came to a dead stop.  An astounding vision appeared before him.  Standing by the old stone fountain, scarcely ten yards away, he saw the figure of a youth.  The slender form was partly draped in a loose tunic of some dim, pale, reddish hue, descending halfway to his knees; on his feet were sandals of the old classic type; his golden hair was bound by a narrow fillet, and in his right hand he held a round, shallow cup, apparently of gold, towards which he was bending his head as though to drink from it.  Austin stood transfixed.  So exquisite a being he had never dreamt of or conceived.  The contour of the limbs, the fall of the tunic, the pose of the head and throat, the ruddy lips, ever so slightly parted to meet the edge of the vessel he was in the act of raising to them, were something more than human.  The whole thing stood out with stereoscopic clearness, and seemed as though self-luminous, although it shed no light on its surroundings.  At that moment the youth turned his head, and met Austin’s eyes with an expression that was not a smile, but something far more subtle, something that bore the same relation to a smile that a smile does to a laugh—­thrilling, penetrating, indescribable.  Austin flung out his hands in rapture.