“Ay! ay!  A bad school, I suppose.”

“Very bad, Captain Helding.  But not the sort of school which you have in your mind at this moment.  Clara’s early years were spent in a lonely old house in the Highlands of Scotland.  The ignorant people about her were the people who did the mischief which I have just been speaking of.  They filled her mind with the superstitions which are still respected as truths in the wild North—­especially the superstition called the Second Sight.”

“God bless me!” cried the captain, “you don’t mean to say she believes in such stuff as that?  In these enlightened times too!”

Mrs. Crayford looked at her partner with a satirical smile.

“In these enlightened times, Captain Helding, we only believe in dancing tables, and in messages sent from the other world by spirits who can’t spell!  By comparison with such superstitions as these, even the Second Sight has something—­in the shape of poetry—­to recommend it, surely?  Estimate for yourself,” she continued seriously, “the effect of such surroundings as I have described on a delicate, sensitive young creature—­a girl with a naturally imaginative temperament leading a lonely, neglected life.  Is it so very surprising that she should catch the infection of the superstition about her?  And is it quite incomprehensible that her nervous system should suffer accordingly, at a very critical period of her life?”

“Not at all, Mrs. Crayford—­not at all, ma’am, as you put it.  Still it is a little startling, to a commonplace man like me, to meet a young lady at a ball who believes in the Second Sight.  Does she really profess to see into the future?  Am I to understand that she positively falls into a trance, and sees people in distant countries, and foretells events to come?  That is the Second Sight, is it not?”

“That is the Second Sight, captain.  And that is, really and positively, what she does.”

“The young lady who is dancing opposite to us?”

“The young lady who is dancing opposite to us.”

The captain waited a little—­letting the new flood of information which had poured in on him settle itself steadily in his mind.  This process accomplished, the Arctic explorer proceeded resolutely on his way to further discoveries.

“May I ask, ma’am, if you have ever seen her in a state of trance with your own eyes?” he inquired.

“My sister and I both saw her in the trance, little more than a month since,” Mrs. Crayford replied.  “She had been nervous and irritable all the morning; and we took her out into the garden to breathe the fresh air.  Suddenly, without any reason for it, the color left her face.  She stood between us, insensible to touch, insensible to sound; motionless as stone, and cold as death in a moment.  The first change we noticed came after a lapse of some minutes.  Her hands began to move slowly, as if she was groping in the dark.  Words dropped one