“Sometimes she seems to be drawing and painting, and talks to her father about pictures; and once she said:  ’Hush! hush—­mother is ill.  She must not know I died, because I promised her I would bear everything.  She made me promise’.”

At this moment the keen wail of a young child, summoned the warden’s wife to her own apartment, and Mr. Dunbar sat down in the rocking-chair beside the iron cot.

In that strange terra incognita, the realm of psychology, are there hidden laws that defy alike the ravages of cerebral disease, and the intuitions of the moral nature; inexorable as the atomic affinities, the molecular attractions that govern crystallization?  Is the day dawning, when the phenomena of hypnotism will be analyzed and formulated as accurately as the symbols of chemistry, or the constituents of protoplasm, or the weird chromatics of spectroscopy?  Beryl’s head, that hitherto had turned restlessly on its pillow, became motionless; the closed eyes opened suddenly, fastened upon the lawyer’s; and some inexplicable influence impelled her to stretch out her hand to him.

“Tiberius, you have come for me.”

“I have come to ask if you are better to-day.”

Her burning fingers closed tightly over his, and the fever flame lent an indescribable splendor to eyes that seemed to penetrate his heart.  Bending over her, he gently lifted a shining fold of hair from her white temple, and still clasping her hand, said in a low voice: 

“Beryl, do you know me?  Are you better?”

“Wait till I finish the sketch from San Michele.  After I am hung, you will sell it.  The light is so lovely.”

Up and down, her right hand moved through the air, making imaginary strokes as on canvas, but her luminous gaze, held by some powerful fascination, never left his.  The gray depths had darkened, swallowed by the widening pupils that made them almost black; and as Mr. Dunbar recognized the complete surrender of physical and mental faculties, her helplessness stirred some unknown sea of tenderness in the man’s hard, practical, realistic nature.

Phlegmatic rather than emotional, and wholly secretive, he had accustomed himself to regard romantic ideality, and susceptibility to sentimentality as a species of intellectual anaemia; holding himself always thoroughly in hand, when subjected to the softening influences that now and then invaded professional existence, and melted the conventional selfish crust over the hearts of his colleagues, as the warm lips and balmy breath of equatorial currents kiss away the jagged ledges of drifting icebergs.  In his laborious life, that which is ordinarily denominated “love” had been so insignificant a factor, that he had never computed its potentiality; much less realized its tremendous importance in solving the problem of his social, financial, and professional success.  Beauty had not allured, nor grace enthralled his fancy; and his betrothal was a mere incident in the quiet tenor of business routine, a necessary means for the accomplishment of a cherished plan.