hat other person?"

"Charlotte Wentworth!"

Mr. Brand looked at Felix for a moment sidewise, mistrustfully; then his
eyes slowly wandered over the ceiling. Felix was sure he was secretly
struck with the romance of the situation. "I think this is none of our
business," the young minister murmured.

"None of mine, perhaps; but surely yours!"

Mr. Brand lingered still, looking at the ceiling; there was evidently
something he wanted to say. "What do you mean by Miss Gertrude being
strong?" he asked abruptly.

"Well," said Felix meditatively, "I mean that she has had a great deal
of self-possession. She was waiting--for years; even when she seemed,
perhaps, to be living in the present. She knew how to wait; she had a
purpose. That 's what I mean by her being strong."

"But what do you mean by her purpose?"

"Well--the purpose to see the world!"

Mr. Brand eyed his strange informant askance again; but he said nothing.
At last he turned away, as if to take leave. He seemed bewildered,
however; for instead of going to the door he moved toward the opposite
corner of the room. Felix stood and watched him for a moment--almost
groping about in the dusk; then he led him to the door, with a tender,
almost fraternal movement. "Is that all you have to say?" asked Mr.
Brand.

"Yes, it 's all--but it will bear a good deal of thinking of."

Felix went with him to the garden-gate, and watched him slowly walk
away into the thickening twilight with a relaxed rigidity that tried
to rectify itself. "He is offended, excited, bewildered, perplexed--and
enchanted!" Felix said to himself. "That 's a capital mixture."

CHAPTER XI

Since that visit paid by the Baroness Munster to Mrs. Acton, of which
some account was given at an earlier stage of this narrative, the
intercourse between these two ladies had been neither frequent nor
intimate. It was not that Mrs. Acton had failed to appreciate Madame
M; auunster's charms; on the contrary, her perception of the graces
of manner and conversation of her brilliant visitor had been only too
acute. Mrs. Acton was, as they said in Boston, very "intense," and her
impressions were apt to be too many for her. The state of her health
required the restriction of emotion; and this is why, receiving, as she
sat in her eternal arm-chair, very few visitors, even of the soberest
local type, she had been obliged to limit the number of her interviews
with a lady whose costume and manner recalled