rd look and manner which
aided the effect of their delivery; but the chill melted away in the
sudden glow of my heart when she again turned towards me and said,--

"Of course you guess, from these preliminary cautions, that you are
going into danger? Mrs. Ashleigh wishes to consult you about Lilian, and
I propose to take you to her house."

"Oh, my friend, my dear friend, how can I ever repay you?" I caught her
hand, the white firm hand, and lifted it to my lips.

She drew it somewhat hastily away, and laying it gently on my shoulder,
said, in a soft voice, "Poor Allen, how little the world knows either
of us! But how little perhaps we know ourselves! Come, your carriage is
here? That is right; we must put down Dr. Jones publicly and in all our
state."

In the carriage Mrs. Poyntz told me the purport of that conversation
with Mrs. Ashleigh to which I owed my re-introduction to Abbots' House.
It seems that Mr. Vigors had called early the morning after my first
visit! had evinced much discomposure on hearing that I had been
summoned! dwelt much on my injurious treatment of Dr. Lloyd, whom,
as distantly related to himself, and he (Mr. Vigors) being distantly
connected with the late Gilbert Ashleigh, he endeavoured to fasten upon
his listener as one of her husband's family, whose quarrel she was bound
in honour to take up. He spoke of me as an infidel "tainted with French
doctrines," and as a practitioner rash and presumptuous; proving his own
freedom from presumption and rashness by flatly deciding that my opinion
must be wrong. Previously to Mrs. Ashleigh's migration to L----, Mr.
Vigors had interested her in the pretended phenomena of mesmerism. He
had consulted a clairvoyante, much esteemed by poor Dr. Lloyd, as
to Lilian's health, and the clairvoyante had declared her to be
constitutionally predisposed to consumption. Mr. Vigors persuaded Mrs.
Ashleigh to come at once with him and see this clairvoyante herself,
armed with a lock of Lilian's hair and a glove she had worn, as the
media of mesmerical rapport.

The clairvoyante, one of those I had publicly denounced as an impostor,
naturally enough denounced me in return. On being asked solemnly by
Mr. Vigors "to look at Dr. Fenwick and see if his influence would be
beneficial to the subject," the sibyl had become violently agitated, and
said that, "when she looked at us together, we were enveloped in a black
cloud; that this portended affliction and sinister conseque