of an eminent physician inquiring for particular symptoms, showed that he still knew what he was talking about; but he made no comments and gave no directions.  He not only puzzled the gentlemen on the stock exchange, but he was himself surprised at the extent of his indifference.  As it seemed only to increase, he made an effort to combat it; he tried to interest himself and to take up his old occupations.  But they appeared unreal to him; do what he would he somehow could not believe in them.  Sometimes he began to fear that there was something the matter with his head; that his brain, perhaps, had softened, and that the end of his strong activities had come.  This idea came back to him with an exasperating force.  A hopeless, helpless loafer, useful to no one and detestable to himself—­this was what the treachery of the Bellegardes had made of him.  In his restless idleness he came back from San Francisco to New York, and sat for three days in the lobby of his hotel, looking out through a huge wall of plate-glass at the unceasing stream of pretty girls in Parisian-looking dresses, undulating past with little parcels nursed against their neat figures.  At the end of three days he returned to San Francisco, and having arrived there he wished he had stayed away.  He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, and it seemed to him that he should never find it again.  He had nothing to do here, he sometimes said to himself; but there was something beyond the ocean that he was still to do; something that he had left undone experimentally and speculatively, to see if it could content itself to remain undone.  But it was not content:  it kept pulling at his heartstrings and thumping at his reason; it murmured in his ears and hovered perpetually before his eyes.  It interposed between all new resolutions and their fulfillment; it seemed like a stubborn ghost, dumbly entreating to be laid.  Till that was done he should never be able to do anything else.

One day, toward the end of the winter, after a long interval, he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram, who apparently was animated by a charitable desire to amuse and distract her correspondent.  She gave him much Paris gossip, talked of General Packard and Miss Kitty Upjohn, enumerated the new plays at the theatre, and inclosed a note from her husband, who had gone down to spend a month at Nice.  Then came her signature, and after this her postscript.  The latter consisted of these few lines:  “I heard three days since from my friend, the Abbe Aubert, that Madame de Cintre last week took the veil at the Carmelites.  It was on her twenty-seventh birthday, and she took the name of her, patroness, St. Veronica.  Sister Veronica has a life-time before her!”