I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who has
nothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in the prospect
of immediate exercise that would carry off the stimulus.

Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down the
room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it leaves the
dark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes that
could detain my father.

Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone:
there were two persons with him. Strange! I had heard no footstep, I
had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right hand
our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had not
seen her for five years. She was a commonplace middle-aged woman, in
silk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not more
than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair,
arranged in cunning braids and folds that looked almost too massive for
the slight figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face they crowned.
But the face had not a girlish expression: the features were sharp, the
pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic. They were fixed
on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful sensation as if a
sharp wind were cutting me. The pale-green dress, and the green leaves
that seemed to form a border about her pale blond hair, made me think of
a Water-Nixie--for my mind was full of German lyrics, and this pale,
fatal-eyed woman, with the green weeds, looked like a birth from some
cold sedgy stream, the daughter of an aged river.

"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .

But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and
there was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding-screen that
stood before the door. I was cold and trembling; I could only totter
forward and throw myself on the sofa. This strange new power had
manifested itself again . . . But _was_ it a power? Might it not rather
be a disease--a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy of
brain into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours all
the more barren? I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye rested
on; I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself from
nightmare, and rang it twice. Pierre came with a look of alarm in his
face.

"Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien?" he said anxiously.

"I