ce
expresses a good deal of what we call character. I should have
preferred waiting for a day or two before relating all I have to
tell," he said, "in answer to what you ask, but as you _insist_ upon
having it now," with a playful kind of smile, "it would be ill-bred
for me to insist that you must wait. But before I begin, would it not
be better if you were to tell me something of what occurred to
yourself when you were taken ill at Raxton?"

'"Then will your story begin where mine breaks off?" I said.

'"We shall see that," he said, "as soon as you have ended yours."

'"Do you know Raxton?" I said.

'At first he seemed to hesitate about his reply, and then said,

'"No, I do not."

'I then told him in as few words as I could our adventures on the
sands on the night of the landslip, and my search for my father's
body afterwards, until I suddenly sank down in a fit. When I had
finished Mr. D'Arcy was silent, and was evidently lost in thought. At
last he said,

'"My story, I perceive, cannot begin where yours breaks off. I first
became acquainted with you in the studio of a famous painter named
Wilderspin, one of the noblest-minded and most admirable men now
breathing, but a great eccentric."

'"Why, Mr. D'Arcy, I never was in a studio in my life until to-day,"
I said.

'"You mean, Miss Wynne, that you were not consciously there," he
said. "But in that studio you certainly were, and the artist, who
reverenced you as a being from another world, was painting your face
in a beautiful picture. While he was doing this you were taken
seriously ill, and your life was despaired of. It was then that I
brought you into the country, and here you have been living and
benefiting by the kind services of Mrs. Titwing for a long time."

'"And you know nothing of my history previously to seeing me in the
London studio?" I asked.

'"All that I could ever learn about that," said he, in what seemed to
me a rather evasive tone, "I had to gather from the incoherent and
rambling talk of Wilderspin, a religious enthusiast whose genius is
very nearly akin to mania. He was so struck by you that he actually
believed you to be not a corporeal woman at all; he believed you had
been sent from the spirit-world by his dead mother to enable him to
paint a great picture."

'"Oh, I must see him, and make him tell me all," I said.

'"Yes," said he, "but not yet."

'What Mr. D'Arcy told me,' said Winnie, 'affected me so deeply that I
rem