quiet me. "Reassure yourself, Asenath," he resumed. "Old as I
am, I have not forgotten the tumultuous fancies of youth. I have passed
my days, indeed, in laboratories; but in all my vigils I have not
forgotten the tune of a young pulse. Age asks with timidity to be spared
intolerable pain; youth, taking fortune by the beard, demands joy like a
right. These things I have not forgotten; none, rather, has more keenly
felt, none more jealously considered them; I have but postponed them to
their day. See, then: you stand without support; the only friend left to
you, this old investigator, old in cunning, young in sympathy. Answer me
but one question: Are you free from the entanglement of what the world
calls love? Do you still command your heart and purposes? or are you
fallen in some bond-slavery of the eye and ear?"

I answered him in broken words; my heart, I think I must have told him,
lay with my dead parents.

"It is enough," he said. "It has been my fate to be called on often, too
often, for those services of which we spoke to-night; none in Utah could
carry them so well to a conclusion; hence there has fallen into my hands
a certain share of influence which I now lay at your service, partly for
the sake of my dead friends, your parents; partly for the interest I
bear you in your own right. I shall send you to England, to the great
city of London, there to await the bridegroom I have selected. He shall
be a son of mine, a young man suitable in age, and not grossly deficient
in that quality of beauty that your years demand. Since your heart is
free, you may well pledge me the sole promise that I ask in return for
much expense and still more danger: to await the arrival of that
bridegroom with the delicacy of a wife."

I sat awhile stunned. The doctor's marriages, I remembered to have
heard, had been unfruitful; and this added perplexity to my distress.
But I was alone, as he had said, alone in that dark land; the thought of
escape, of any equal marriage, was already enough to revive in me some
dawn of hope; and, in what words I know not, I accepted the proposal.

He seemed more moved by my consent than I could reasonably have looked
for. "You shall see," he cried; "you shall judge for yourself." And
hurrying to the next room he returned with a small portrait somewhat
coarsely done in oils. It showed a man in the dress of nearly forty
years before, young indeed, but still recognisable to be the doctor. "Do
you like