me which would satisfy others
was easily found. I said that I had been long weary of physic, and that
the accident had decided me on refusing to take more.

That night I did not wake quite so often as usual. When she came to me
the next day, Susan noticed that I looked better. The day after, the
other nurse made the same observation. At the end of the week, I was
able to leave my bed, and sit by the fireside, while Susan read to
me. Some mysterious change in my health had completely falsified the
prediction of the medical men. I sent to London for my doctor--and told
him that the improvement in me had begun on the day when I left off
taking his remedies. "Can you explain it?" I asked.

He answered that no such "resurrection from the dead" (as he called it)
had ever happened in his long experience. On leaving me, he asked for
the latest prescriptions that had been written. I inquired what he was
going to do with them. "I mean to go to the chemist," he replied, "and
to satisfy myself that your medicines have been properly made up."

I owed it to Mrs. Mozeen's true interest in me to tell her what had
happened. The same day I wrote to her. I also mentioned what the
doctor had said, and asked her to call on him, and ascertain if the
prescriptions had been shown to the chemist, and if any mistake had been
made.

A more innocently intended letter than this never was written. And yet
there are people who have declared that it was inspired by suspicion of
Mrs. Mozeen!

EIGHTH EPOCH.

WHETHER I was so weakened by illness as to be incapable of giving my
mind to more than one subject for reflection at a time (that subject
being now the extraordinary recovery of my health)--or whether I was
preoccupied by the effort, which I was in honor bound to make, to resist
the growing attraction to me of Susan's society--I cannot presume to
say. This only I know: when the discovery of the terrible position
toward Rothsay in which I now stood suddenly overwhelmed me, an interval
of some days had passed. I cannot account for it. I can only say--so it
was.

Susan was in the room. I was wholly unable to hide from her the sudden
change of color which betrayed the horror that had overpowered me. She
said, anxiously: "What has frightened you?"

I don't think I heard her. The play was in my memory again--the fatal
play, which had wound itself into the texture of Rothsay's life and
mine. In vivid remembrance, I saw once more the dramatic situ