ho was the celebrated surgeon Sir Nicholas Rem.

Usually Tasso came running in when the hall-door was opened to him. Not a
sound of him could be heard. The ladies blew his familiar whistle. He
trotted back to a third appeal, and was, unfortunately for them, not
caressed; he received reproaches from two forefingers directed straight
at his reason. He saw it and felt it. The hug of him was deferred to the
tender good-night to him in his basket at the foot of the ladies' beds.

On entering their spacious bed-chamber, they were so fatigued that sleep
appeared to their minds the compensating logical deduction. Miss Dorothea
suppressed a yawn, and inflicted it upon Miss Virginia, who returned it,
with an apology, and immediately had her sister's hand on her shoulder,
for, an attempted control of one of the irresistibles; a specacle
imparting bitter shudders and shots to the sympathetic jawbones of an
observer. Hand at mouth, for not in privacy would they have been guilty
of exposing a grimace, they signified, under an interim smile, their
maidenly submission to the ridiculous force of nature: after which, Miss
Virginia retired to the dressing-room, absorbed in woeful recollection of
the resolute No they had been compelled to reiterate, in response to the
most eloquent and, saving for a single instance, admirable man, their
cousin, the representative of 'the blood,' supplicating them. A recreant
thankfulness coiled within her bosom at the thought, that Dorothea, true
to her office of speaker, had tasked herself with the cruel utterance and
repetition of the word. Victor's wonderful eyes, his voice, yet more than
his urgent pleas; and also, in the midst of his fiery flood of speech,
his gentleness, his patience, pathos, and a man's tone through it all;
were present to her.

Disrobed, she knocked at the door.

'I have called to you twice,' Dorothea said; and she looked a motive for
the call.

'What is it?' said Virginia, with faltering sweetness, with a terrible
divination.

The movement of a sigh was made. 'Are you aware of anything, dear?'

Virginia was taken with the contrary movement of a sniff. But the fear
informing it prevented it from being venturesome. Doubt of the pure
atmosphere of their bed-chamber, appeared to her as too heretic even for
the positive essay. In affirming, that she was not aware of anything, her
sight fell on Tasso. His eyeballs were those of a little dog that has
been awfully questioned.

'I