ighly of
her talents. She began to have a reputation in scientific circles, and
owing to her duties with Carus she could not come to the Stewarts' as
often as she had formerly done. But she preserved her habit of
dismissing the parlor-maid at the door and creeping up to the
drawing-room like a thief in the night.

On the day following Sir Cyril Meres's luncheon-party she arrived in her
usual fashion. The windows were shaded against the afternoon sun, but
the sky was now overcast, and such a twilight reigned within that at
first she could distinguish little, and the drawing-room seemed to her
to be empty. But in a minute she discerned a white figure supine in a
large arm-chair--Mildred, and asleep.

She had a writing-board on her knee, and a hand resting on it still held
a stylograph. She must have dozed over her writing; yet she did not stir
when her name was uttered. Tims noticed a peculiar stillness in her, a
something almost inanimate in her attitude and countenance, which
suggested that this was no ordinary siesta. The idea that Milly might
even now be resurgent fluttered Tims's pulses with a mixed emotion.

"Good old Milly! Poor old girl!" she breathed to the white figure in the
arm-chair. "Don't be in a hurry! You won't find it all beer and skittles
when you're here."

It seemed to her that a slight convulsion passed over the sleeper's
face.

Tims seated herself on a low chair, in the attitude of certain gargoyles
that crouch under the eaves of old churches, elbows on knees, chin on
hands, and fixed her eyes in silence on her silent companion. In spite
of her work along the acknowledged lines of science, she had pursued her
hypnotic studies furtively, half in scorn and half in fear of her
scientific brethren. What would she not have given to be enabled to
watch, to comprehend the changes passing within that human form so close
to her that she could see its every external detail, could touch it by
the out-stretching of a hand! But its inner shrine, its secret place,
remained barred against those feeble implements of sense with which
nature has provided the explorative human intelligence. Its content was
more mysterious, more inaccessible than that of the remotest star which
yields the secret of its substance to the spectroscope of the
astronomer.

Tims's thoughts had forsaken the personal side of the question, when she
was recalled to it by seeing the right hand in which the stylograph had
been lying begin