Again the two figures in the drawing-room became visible.  They were now a little withdrawn from the window, face to face, and, as I could see by Zenobia’s emphatic gestures, were discussing some subject in which she, at least, felt a passionate concern.  By and by she broke away, and vanished beyond my ken.  Westervelt approached the window, and leaned his forehead against a pane of glass, displaying the sort of smile on his handsome features which, when I before met him, had let me into the secret of his gold-bordered teeth.  Every human being, when given over to the Devil, is sure to have the wizard mark upon him, in one form or another.  I fancied that this smile, with its peculiar revelation, was the Devil’s signet on the Professor.

This man, as I had soon reason to know, was endowed with a cat-like circumspection; and though precisely the most unspiritual quality in the world, it was almost as effective as spiritual insight in making him acquainted with whatever it suited him to discover.  He now proved it, considerably to my discomfiture, by detecting and recognizing me, at my post of observation.  Perhaps I ought to have blushed at being caught in such an evident scrutiny of Professor Westervelt and his affairs.  Perhaps I did blush.  Be that as it might, I retained presence of mind enough not to make my position yet more irksome by the poltroonery of drawing back.

Westervelt looked into the depths of the drawing-room, and beckoned.  Immediately afterwards Zenobia appeared at the window, with color much heightened, and eyes which, as my conscience whispered me, were shooting bright arrows, barbed with scorn, across the intervening space, directed

full at my sensibilities as a gentleman.  If the truth must be told, far as her flight-shot was, those arrows hit the mark.  She signified her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal.  The next moment she administered one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has at hand, ready for any offence (and which she so seldom spares on due occasion), by letting down a white linen curtain between the festoons of the damask ones.  It fell like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the interval between the acts.

Priscilla had disappeared from the boudoir.  But the dove still kept her desolate perch on the peak of the attic window.

XIX.  ZENOBIA’S DRAWING-ROOM

The remainder of the day, so far as I was concerned, was spent in meditating on these recent incidents.  I contrived, and alternately rejected, innumerable methods of accounting for the presence of Zenobia and Priscilla, and the connection of Westervelt with both.  It must be owned, too, that I had a keen, revengeful sense of the insult inflicted by Zenobia’s scornful recognition, and more particularly by her letting down the curtain; as if such were the proper