tor Prance dealt in facts; Ransom had already discovered that; and
some of her facts were very interesting.

"The Music Hall--isn't that your great building?" he asked.

"Well, it's the biggest we've got; it's pretty big, but it isn't so big
as Miss Chancellor's ideas," added Doctor Prance. "She has taken it to
bring out Miss Tarrant before the general public--she has never appeared
that way in Boston--on a great scale. She expects her to make a big
sensation. It will be a great night, and they are preparing for it. They
consider it her real beginning."

"And this is the preparation?" Basil Ransom said.

"Yes; as I say, it's their principal interest."

Ransom listened, and while he listened he meditated. He had thought it
possible Verena's principles might have been shaken by the profession of
faith to which he treated her in New York; but this hardly looked like
it. For some moments Doctor Prance and he stood together in silence.

"You don't hear the words," the doctor remarked, with a smile which, in
the dark, looked Mephistophelean.

"Oh, I know the words!" the young man exclaimed, with rather a groan, as
he offered her his hand for good-night.

XXXVI

A certain prudence had determined him to put off his visit till the
morning; he thought it more probable that at that time he should be able
to see Verena alone, whereas in the evening the two young women would be
sure to be sitting together. When the morrow dawned, however, Basil
Ransom felt none of the trepidation of the procrastinator; he knew
nothing of the reception that awaited him, but he took his way to the
cottage designated to him over-night by Doctor Prance, with the step of
a man much more conscious of his own purpose than of possible obstacles.
He made the reflexion, as he went, that to see a place for the first
time at night is like reading a foreign author in a translation. At the
present hour--it was getting towards eleven o'clock--he felt that he was
dealing with the original. The little straggling, loosely-clustered town
lay along the edge of a blue inlet, on the other side of which was a
low, wooded shore, with a gleam of white sand where it touched the
water. The narrow bay carried the vision outward to a picture that
seemed at once bright and dim--a shining, slumbering summer sea, and a
far-off, circling line of coast, which, under the August sun, was hazy
and delicate. Ransom regarded the place as a town because Doctor Prance
had