my father would reply—­many a time I have heard him say it—­’a child’s brain is like a flower that blossoms in perceptions and goes to seed in abstractions.  Correct concepts are the raw material of reason.  Every desk in your school is an intellectual loom which is expected to weave a sound fabric out of rotten raw material.  While your children are wasting their fibre in memorising the antique errors of classical thought my child is being fitted to perceive new truths for herself.’  It is needless to say his friends considered these views altogether too radical.  But for all that I was never sent to school.  My father’s library was always at my disposal, and I was taught how to use it.  We were constantly together, and grew so into each other’s lives that “—­but her voice failed her, and her eyes moistened.  Maitland, though he apparently did not notice her emotion, so busy was he in making notes, quickly put a question which diverted her attention.

“Your father seemed last night to have a presentiment of some impending calamity.  Was this a common experience?”

“Of late, yes.  He has told me some six or seven times of dreaming the same dreams—­a dream in which some assassin struck him out of the darkness.”  “Did you at any of these times notice anything which might now lead you to believe this fancied repetition was the result of any mental malady?”

“No.”

“Was his description of the dreams always the same?”

“No; never were they twice alike, save in the one particular of the unseen assassin.”

“Hum!, Did the impression of these dreams remain long with him?”

“He never recovered from it, and each dream only accentuated his assurance that the experience was prophetic.  When once I tried to dissuade him from this view, he said to me:  ’Gwen, it is useless; I am making no mistake.  When I am gone you will know why I am now so sure—­I cannot tell you now, it would only ’—­here he stopped short, and, turning abruptly to me, said with a fierceness entirely alien to his disposition:  ’Hatred is foreign to my nature, but I hate that man with a perfect hell of loathing!  Have I been a kind father to you, Gwen?  If so, promise me ’—­and he seized me by the wrist—­’ promise me if I’m murdered—­I may as well say when I’m murdered—­you will look upon the man who brings my assassin to justice—­the thought that he may escape is damning—­as your dearest friend on earth!  You will deny him nothing.  You will learn later that I have taken care to reward him.  My child, you will owe this man a debt you can never repay, for he will have enabled your father’s soul to find repose.  I dreamed last night that I came back from the dead, and heard my avenger ask you to be his wife.  You refused, and at your ingratitude my restless soul returned to torment everlasting.  Swear to me, Gwen, that you’ll deny him nothing, nothing, nothing!’ I promised him, and he seemed much reassured.  ‘I am satisfied,’ he said, ’and now can die in peace, for you are an anomaly, Gwen,—­a woman who fully knows the nature of a covenant,’ and he put his arm about me, and drew me to him.  His fierceness had subsided as quickly as it had appeared, and he was now all tenderness.”