ent, he found
himself powerless beneath a calm, stern eye which possessed the
mysterious property of quelling frenzy at its height. The person whom
he had now encountered was the physician, Dr. Clarke, the duties of
whose sad profession had led him to the province-house, where he was
an infrequent guest in more prosperous times.

"Young man, what is your purpose?" demanded he.

"I seek the Lady Eleanore," answered Jervase Helwyse, submissively.

"All have fled from her," said the physician. "Why do you seek her
now? I tell you, youth, her nurse fell death-stricken on the threshold
of that fatal chamber. Know ye not that never came such a curse to our
shores as this lovely Lady Eleanore, that her breath has filled the
air with poison, that she has shaken pestilence and death upon the
land from the folds of her accursed mantle?"

"Let me look upon her," rejoined the mad youth, more wildly. "Let me
behold her in her awful beauty, clad in the regal garments of the
pestilence. She and Death sit on a throne together; let me kneel down
before them."

"Poor youth!" said Dr. Clarke, and, moved by a deep sense of human
weakness, a smile of caustic humor curled his lip even then. "Wilt
thou still worship the destroyer and surround her image with fantasies
the more magnificent the more evil she has wrought? Thus man doth ever
to his tyrants. Approach, then. Madness, as I have noted, has that
good efficacy that it will guard you from contagion, and perhaps its
own cure may be found in yonder chamber." Ascending another flight of
stairs, he threw open a door and signed to Jervase Helwyse that he
should enter.

The poor lunatic, it seems probable, had cherished a delusion that his
haughty mistress sat in state, unharmed herself by the pestilential
influence which as by enchantment she scattered round about her. He
dreamed, no doubt, that her beauty was not dimmed, but brightened into
superhuman splendor. With such anticipations he stole reverentially to
the door at which the physician stood, but paused upon the threshold,
gazing fearfully into the gloom of the darkened chamber.

"Where is the Lady Eleanore?" whispered he.

"Call her," replied the physician.

"Lady Eleanore! princess! queen of Death!" cried Jervase Helwyse,
advancing three steps into the chamber. "She is not here. There, on
yonder table, I behold the sparkle of a diamond which once she wore
upon her bosom. There"--and he shuddered--"there hangs her mantle, o