flection. The renewed study of his art in Rome without any
counterbalancing practical pursuit had nourished and developed his
natural responsiveness to impressions; he now felt that his old trouble,
his doom--his curse, indeed, he had sometimes called it--was come
back again. His divinity was not yet propitiated for that original sin
against her image in the person of Avice the First, and now, at the age
of one-and-sixty, he was urged on and on like the Jew Ahasuerus--or, in
the phrase of the islanders themselves, like a blind ram.

The Goddess, an abstraction to the general, was a fairly real personage
to Pierston. He had watched the marble images of her which stood in his
working-room, under all changes of light and shade in the brightening
of morning, in the blackening of eve, in moonlight, in lamplight. Every
line and curve of her body none, naturally, knew better than he;
and, though not a belief, it was, as has been stated, a formula, a
superstition, that the three Avices were inter-penetrated with her
essence.

'And the next Avice--your daughter,' he said stumblingly; 'she is, you
say, a governess at the castle opposite?'

Mrs. Pierston reaffirmed the fact, adding that the girl often slept at
home because she, her mother, was so lonely. She often thought she would
like to keep her daughter at home altogether.

'She plays that instrument, I suppose?' said Pierston, regarding the
piano.

'Yes, she plays beautifully; she had the best instruction that masters
could give her. She was educated at Sandbourne.'

'Which room does she call hers when at home?' he asked curiously.

'The little one over this.'

It had been his own. 'Strange,' he murmured.

He finished tea, and sat after tea, but the youthful Avice did not
arrive. With the Avice present he conversed as the old friend--no more.
At last it grew dusk, and Pierston could not find an excuse for staying
longer.

'I hope to make the acquaintance--of your daughter,' he said in leaving,
knowing that he might have added with predestinate truth, 'of my new
tenderly-beloved.'

'I hope you will,' she answered. 'This evening she evidently has gone
for a walk instead of coming here.'

'And, by-the-bye, you have not told me what you especially wanted to see
me for?'

'Ah, no. I will put it off.'

'Very well. I don't pretend to guess.'

'I must tell you another time.'

'If it is any little business in connection with your late husband's
affairs, do comman