“Don’t be frightened about me, Euthymia.  I don’t mean to give him a chance to work me into his paper, if I can help it.  But if you can get him to try his skill upon this interesting personage and his antipathy, so much the better.  I am very curious about it, and therefore about him.  I want to know what has produced this strange state of feeling in a young man who ought to have all the common instincts of a social being.  I believe there are unexplained facts in the region of sympathies and antipathies which will repay study with a deeper insight into the mysteries of life than we have dreamed of hitherto.  I often wonder whether there are not heart-waves and soul-waves as well as ‘brain-waves,’ which some have already recognized.”

Euthymia wondered, as well she might, to hear this young woman talking the language of science like an adept.  The truth is, Lurida was one of those persons who never are young, and who, by way of compensation, will never be old.  They are found in both sexes.  Two well-known graduates of one of our great universities are living examples of this precocious but enduring intellectual development.  If the readers of this narrative cannot pick them out, they need not expect the writer of it to help them.  If they guess rightly who they are, they will recognize the fact that just such exceptional individuals as the young woman we are dealing with are met with from time to time in families where intelligence has been cumulative for two or three generations.

Euthymia was very willing that the questioning and questionable visitor should learn all that was known in the village about the nebulous individual whose misty environment all the eyes in the village were trying to penetrate, but that he should learn it from some other informant than Lurida.

The next morning, as the Interviewer took his seat on a bench outside his door, to smoke his after-breakfast cigar, a bright-looking and handsome youth, whose features recalled those of Euthymia so strikingly that one might feel pretty sure he was her brother, took a seat by his side.  Presently the two were engaged in conversation.  The Interviewer asked all sorts of questions about everybody in the village.  When he came to inquire about Maurice, the youth showed a remarkable interest regarding him.  The greatest curiosity, he said, existed with reference to this personage.  Everybody was trying to find out what his story was,—­for a story, and a strange one, he must surely have,—­and nobody had succeeded.

The Interviewer began to be unusually attentive.  The young man told him the various antipathy stories, about the evil-eye hypothesis, about his horse-taming exploits, his rescuing the student whose boat was overturned, and every occurrence he could recall which would help out the effect of his narrative.