'Ideas which you have mentioned to any one?' he went on. 'To no living creature,' I replied-' as yet.'

'This is very strange!' he said, still earnestly reading my face. 'What interest can you have in a dead woman whom you never knew? Why did you ask me that question, just now? Have you any motive in coming here to see me?' I boldly acknowledged the truth. I said, 'I have a

motive.'

'Is it connected with Eustace Macallan's first wife?' 'It is.'

'With anything that happened in her lifetime?' 'No.'

'With her death?'

'Yes.'

He suddenly clasped his hands, with a wild gesture of despair and then pressed them both on his head, as if he was struck by some sudden pain.

'I can't hear it to-night!' he said; 'I would give worlds to hear it but I daren't; I should lose all hold over myself in the state I am in now. I am not equal to raking up the horror and the mystery of the past; I have not courage enough to open the grave of the martyred dead. Did you hear me, when you came here? I have an immense imagination. It runs riot at times. It makes an actor of me. I play the parts of all the heroes that ever lived. I feel their characters. I merge myself in their individualities. For the time, I am the man I fancy myself to be. I can't help it. I am obliged to do it. If I restrained my imagination, when the fit is on me, I should go mad. I let myself loose. It lasts for hours. It leaves me, with my energies worn out, with my sensibilities frightfully acute. Rouse any melancholy or terrible associations in me, at such times; and I am capable of hysterics, I am capable of screaming. You heard me scream. You shall not see me in hysterics. No, Mrs. Valeria-no, you innocent reflection of the dead and gone-I

would not frighten you for the world. Will you come here to-morrow in the day-time? I have got a chaise and a pony. Ariel, my delicate Ariel, can drive. She shall call at Mama Macallan's and fetch you. We will talk to-morrow, when I am fit for it. I am dying to hear you. I will be fit for you in the morning. I will be civil, intelligent, communicative in the morning. No more of it now! Away with the subject! The too exciting, the too-interesting subject! I must compose myself, or my brains will explode in my head. Music is the true narcotic for excitable brains. My harp! my harp!'

He rushed away in his chair to the far end of the room— passing Mrs. Macallan as she returned to me, bent on hastening our departure.

'Come!' said the old lady, irritably. and he has made a good show of himself. be tiresome. Come away.'

You have seen him,

More of him might

Miserrimus Dexter

The chair returned to us more slowly. was working it with one hand only. In the other, he held a harp, of a pattern which I had hitherto only seen in pictures. The strings were few in number; and the instrument was so small that I could have held it easily on my lap. It was the ancient harp of the pictured Muses and the legendary Welsh Bards.

me.

'Good night, Dexter,' said Mrs. Macallan.

He held up one hand imperatively.

Wait!' he said. 'Let her hear me sing.' He turned to 'I decline to be indebted to other people for my poetry and my music,' he went on. 'I compose my own poetry, and my own music. I improvise. Give me a moment to think I will improvise for You.'

He closed his eyes, and rested his head on the frame of the harp. His fingers gently touched the strings while he was. thinking. In a few minutes he lifted his head, looked at me, and struck the first notes-the prelude to the song.

Was it good music? or bad? I cannot decide whether it was music at all. It was a wild barbaric succession of sounds; utterly unlike any modern composition. Sometimes, it suggested a slow and undulating Oriental dance. Sometimes it modulated into tones which reminded me of the severer harmonies of the old Gregorian chants. The words, when they followed the prelude, were as wild, as recklessly free from all restraint of critical rules, as the music. They were assuredly inspired by the occasion; I was the theme of the strange song. And thus-in one of the finest tenor voices I ever heard my poet sang of me:

Why does she come?

She reminds me of the lost;
She reminds me of the dead :

In her form like the other,
In her walk like the other:
Why does she come?

Does Destiny bring her?

Shall we range together

The mazes of the past?

Shall we search together
The secrets of the past?

Shall we interchange thoughts, surmises, suspicions ?

Does Destiny bring her?

The Future will show.
Let the night pass;

Let the day come.

I shall see into Her mind:

She will look into Mine.

The Future will show.

His voice sank, his fingers touched the strings more and more feebly as he approached the last lines. The overwrought brain needed, and took, its re-animating repose. At the final words, his eyes slowly closed. His head lay back on the chair. He slept with his arms round his harp, as a child sleeps, hugging its last new toy.

We stole out of the room on tiptoe, and left Miserrimus Dexter-poet, composer, and madman in his peaceful sleep.

CHAPTER XXVI.

MORE OF MY OBSTINACY.

ARIEL was downstairs in the shadowy hall, half asleep, half awake, waiting to see the visitors clear of the house. Without speaking to us, without looking at us, she led the way down the dark garden walk, and locked the gate behind us. 'Good night, Ariel,' I called out to her over the paling. Nothing answered me but the tramp of her heavy footsteps returning to the house, and the dull thump, a moment afterwards, of the closing door.

The footman had thoughtfully lit the carriage lamps. Carrying one of them to serve as a lantern, he lighted us over the wilds of the brick-desert, and landed us safely on the path by the high road.

'Well!' said my mother-in-law, when we were comfortably seated in the carriage again. You have seen Miserrimus Dexter; and I hope you are satisfied. I will do him the justice to declare that I never, in all my experience, saw him more completely crazy than he was to-night. What do you say?'

'I don't presume to dispute your opinion,' I answered. 'But, speaking for myself, I am not quite sure that he is mad.'

6

'Not mad!' cried Mrs. Macallan, after those frantic performances in his chair? Not mad, after the exhibition he made of his unfortunate cousin? Not mad, after the song that he sang in your honour, and the falling asleep by way of conclusion? Ob, Valeria! Valeria ! Well said the wisdom

of our ancestors-there are none so blind as those who won't see !'

'Pardon me, dear Mrs. Macallan-I saw everything that you mention; and I never felt more surprised, or more confounded, in my life. But now I have recovered from my amazement, and can think over it quietly, I must still venture to doubt whether this strange man is really mad, in the true meaning of the word. It seems to me that he openly expresses-I admit in a very reckless and boisterous waythoughts and feelings which most of us are ashamed of as weaknesses, and which we keep to ourselves accordingly. I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certain pleasure in seeing myself in my new character. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are. Mr. Dexter lets out the secret, just as the children do-and, if that is madness, he is certainly mad. But I noticed that when his imagination cooled down, he became Miserrimus Dexter again-he no more believed himself, than we believed him, to be Napoleon or Shakspere. Besides, some allowance is surely to be made for the solitary, sedentary life that he leads. I am not learned enough to trace the influence of that life in making him what he is. But I think I can see the result in an over-excited imagination; and I fancy I can trace his exhibiting his power over the poor cousin, and his singing of that wonderful song, to no more formidable cause than inordinate self-conceit. I hope the confession will not lower me seriously in your good opinion-but I must say I have enjoyed my visit; and, worse still, Miserrimus Dexter really interests me!'

'Does this learned discourse on Dexter mean that you are going to see him again?' asked Mrs. Macallan.

'I don't know how I may feel about it to-morrow morning,'