y mysterious in her blue eyes,
far too mysterious for being confided to loud words, and so a whisper
told me that her mother was taken ill, and that Dr. Rogers had been sent
for. This little bit of information carried more to my mind than it
brought away from Edith's. I knew before that Mrs. Graeme was on the eve
of confinement, and it now appeared she had been taken in labour. I saw,
too, that my visit had not been very well timed, and the worse that
Graeme himself was in the extraordinary frame of mind in which I found
him--unfit for facing the dangers, repaying the affections, performing
the duties, and receiving the honours or enjoying the hopes of his
situation. A rap at the door was the signal for Edith's departure, with
the words on her tongue that she knew the doctor's knock. I was now, I
thought, to be left to myself; nor was I displeased, for I wanted a
lounge and a meditation; though of the latter I could not see that I
could make much, if any, more than confirming myself against all
preternaturals as agents on earth, however certain their existence may
be beyond the mystic veil that divides the two worlds. I had known
Graeme's crime and Gourlay's self-murder; but the crime was a trick
among blacklegs, and the suicide was the madness of a gambler, who had
risked his money and was ruined at the moment he wanted to ruin another.
Surely Heaven had something else to do with its retributive lightnings
than employ them, in subversion of all natural laws, in a cause so
inferior in turpitude to others that every hour pass into oblivion, with
more of a mark of natural, and less or none of supernatural
chastisement. I thought I might be contented with such a view of these
prodigies as might quickly consign them to the limbo of men's
machinations; yet somehow or other--perhaps the Burgundy bottle, if it
could have spoken, like that of Asmodeus, might have helped the
solution--I got dreamy, and of course foolish, raising objections
against my own conclusions, and instituting an _alter ego_ to argue
against myself for Graeme's theory. It has always seemed strange to me,
that though mankind hate metaphysics, they are all natural
metaphysicians, especially when a little _wined_. Perhaps the true
reason may be, that as wine came from the gods, it is endued with the
power of raising us to its source. At least, our aspirations, from being
_devine_, become wonderfully _divine_, so that supernatural agencies wax
less difficult to