“Why?”

“I cannot say—­except that I dread to be left alone all day.  You may laugh at me, but I feel as if something terrible were hanging over me—­or you.  The spiritual oppression is like the physical presentiment sensitive temperaments suffer when a thunder-storm is brooding, but not ready to break.  Yet I can refer my fears to no known cause.”

“That is folly.”  Mr. Aylett bit off the end of a cigar, and felt in his vest pocket for a match-safe.  “You should be able always to assign a reason for the fear as well as the hope that is in you.  You have no idea, you say, from what recent event your prognostication takes its hue?”

She laughed, and straightened her fine neck.

“From the same imprudence that has consigned poor Herbert to the house for the day, I suspect—­a late and heavy dinner.  I had the nightmare twice before morning.  You will be home to supper?”

“Yes.”

Hesitating upon the monosyllable, he took hold of her elbows, so as to bring her directly before him, and searched her countenance until it was dyed with blushes.

“Why do you color so furiously?” he asked in raillery that had a sad or sardonic accent.  “I was about to ask if you would be inconsolable if I never came back.  Perhaps your presentiment points to some such fatality.  These little accidents have happened in better-regulated families than ours.”

“Winston!”

She gasped and blanched in pain or terror.

“What is the matter?  Have I hurt you?” releasing his grasp.

“Yes—­here!” laying his hand upon her heart, the beautiful eyes terrified and pathetic as those of a wounded deer.  “For the love of Heaven, never stab me again with such suggestions.  When you die, I shall not care to live.  When you cease to love me, I shall wish we had died together on our marriage-day—­my husband!”

He let her twine her arms about his neck, laid his cheek to her brow, clasped her tightly and kissed her impetuously, madly, again and yet again—­disengaged himself, and ran down the steps.  She was standing on the top one, still flushed and breathless from the violence of his embrace, when he looked back from the gate, her commanding figure framed by the embowering creepers, as Mabel’s girlish shape had been when Frederic Chilton waved his farewell to her from the same spot.

Did either of them think of it, or would either have reckoned it an ominous coincidence, if the remembrance of that long-ago parting had presented itself then and there?

Herbert spent the day upon the lounge in the family sitting-room—­a cosy retreat, between the parlor and the conservatory, which had been added to the lower floor in the reign of the present queen.  Her brother’s seizure was no trifling ailment.  Alternations of stupor and racking spasms of pain defied, for several hours, his wife’s application of the remedies she had found efficacious in former