t. Mr
Renshawe's manner, though at times indicative of considerable nervous
irritability, was kind and respectful to the young widow; and I began
to hope that the delusion he had for awhile laboured under had finally
passed away.

The hope was a fallacious one. We were sitting at tea on a Sunday
evening, when Mrs Irwin, pale and trembling with fright and nervous
agitation, came hastily in with her little boy in her hand. I
correctly divined what had occurred. In reply to my hurried
questioning, the astounded young matron told me in substance, that
within the last two or three days Mr Renshawe's strange behaviour and
disjointed talk had both bewildered and alarmed her. He vaguely
intimated that she, Ellen Irwin, was really Laura somebody else--that
she had kept company with him, Mr Renshawe, in Yorkshire, before she
knew poor George--with many other strange things he muttered rather
than spoke out; and especially that it was owing to her son reminding
her continually of his father, that she pretended not to have known Mr
Renshawe twelve or thirteen years ago. 'In short,' added the young
woman with tears and blushes, 'he is utterly crazed; for he asked me
just now to marry him--which I would not do for the Indies--and is
gone away in a passion to find a paper that will prove, he says, I am
that other Laura something.'

There was something so ludicrous in all this, however vexatious and
insulting under the circumstances--the recent death of the husband,
and the young widow's unprotected state--that neither of us could
forbear laughing at the conclusion of Mrs Irwin's story. It struck me,
too, that Renshawe had conceived a real and ardent passion for the
very comely and interesting person before us--first prompted, no
doubt, by her accidental likeness to the portrait; and that some
mental flaw or other caused him to confound her with the Laura who had
in early life excited the same emotion in his mind.

Laughable as the matter was in one sense, there was--and the fair
widow had noticed as well as myself--a serious, menacing expression in
the man's eye not to be trifled with; and at her earnest request, we
accompanied her to her own apartment, to which Renshawe had threatened
soon to return. We had not been a minute in the room, when his hurried
step was heard approaching, and Mrs Waters and I stepped hastily into
an adjoining closet, where we could hear and partly see all that
passed. Renshawe's speech trembled with fer