. 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.

The Interviewer was becoming excited. "Can't find out anything about
him, you said, did n-'t you? How do you know there's anything to find?
Do you want to know what I think he is? I'll tell you. I think he is an
actor,--a fellow from one of the city theatres. Those fellows go off in
their summer vacation, and like to puzzle the country folks. They are
the very same chaps, like as not, the visitors have seen in plays at the
city theatres; but of course they don't know 'em in plain clothes. Kings
and Emperors look pretty shabby off the stage sometimes, I can tell you."

The young man followed the Interviewer's lead. "I shouldn't wonder