--evidently from the hand of Grammer. Grace put the paper in her
pocket with a look of much relief.

As Fitzpiers did not take up the money (half of which had come from
Grace's own purse), she pushed it a little nearer to him. "No, no. I
shall not take it from the old woman," he said. "It is more strange
than the fact of a surgeon arranging to obtain a subject for dissection
that our acquaintance should be formed out of it."

"I am afraid you think me uncivil in showing my dislike to the notion.
But I did not mean to be."

"Oh no, no." He looked at her, as he had done before, with puzzled
interest. "I cannot think, I cannot think," he murmured. "Something
bewilders me greatly." He still reflected and hesitated. "Last night
I sat up very late," he at last went on, "and on that account I fell
into a little nap on that couch about half an hour ago. And during my
few minutes of unconsciousness I dreamed--what do you think?--that you
stood in the room."

Should she tell? She merely blushed.

"You may imagine," Fitzpiers continued, now persuaded that it had,
indeed, been a dream, "that I should not have dreamed of you without
considerable thinking about you first."

He could not be acting; of that she felt assured.

"I fancied in my vision that you stood there," he said, pointing to
where she had paused. "I did not see you directly, but reflected in
the glass. I thought, what a lovely creature! The design is for once
carried out. Nature has at last recovered her lost union with the
Idea! My thoughts ran in that direction because I had been reading the
work of a transcendental philosopher last night; and I dare say it was
the dose of Idealism that I received from it that made me scarcely able
to distinguish between reality and fancy. I almost wept when I awoke,
and found that you had appeared to me in Time, but not in Space, alas!"

At moments there was something theatrical in the delivery of
Fitzpiers's effusion; yet it would have been inexact to say that it was
intrinsically theatrical. It often happens that in situations of
unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real
feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable
from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth,
with the evil consequence, if perceived, that the substance is
estimated by the superficies, and the whole rejected.

Grace, however, was no specialist in men's manners, and s