neither loved Alick nor, wished
to love him. Whether she had unwittingly deceived him in the first
place, and in the second ought to sacrifice herself for him, unloving,
was each a question on which she pondered full of those doubts and
self-reproaches that so grievously beset her.

As she was wandering drearily onward Mr. Gryce saw her from a side
path. He struck off to meet her, smiling, for he had taken a strong
affection for this strange and beautiful young creature, which he
justified to himself as interest in her history.

This acute, suspicious and inquisitive old heathen had some queer
notions packed away in his wallet of biological speculations--notions
which supplemented the fruits of his natural gifts, and which
he always managed to harmonize with what he already knew by more
commonplace means. He had been long in the East, whence he had brought
a cargo of half-scientific, half-superstitious fancies--belief
in astrology, mesmerism, spiritualism, and cheiromancy the most
prominent. He could cast a horoscope, summon departed spirits, heal
the sick and read the reticent by mesmeric force, and explain the past
as well as prophesy the future by the lines in the hand.

So at least he said; and people were bound to believe that he believed
in himself when he said so. He had once looked at Leam's hand, and had
seen something there which, translated by his rules, had helped him
on the road that he had already opened for himself by private inquiry
based on the likelihood of things. Crime, love, sorrow--it was no
ordinary history that was printed in the lines of her feverish little
palm, as it was no ordinary character that looked out from her intense
pathetic face. There was something almost as interesting here as a
meditation on the mystic Nirvana or a discourse on that persistent
residuum of all myths--Maya, delusion.

It was to follow up the line thus opened to him that he had attached
himself with so much zeal to his landlord, unsympathetic as such a man
as Sebastian Dundas must needs be to a metaphysical and superstitious
student of humanity, a born detective, shrewd, inquisitive and
suspicious. But he attached himself for the sake of Leam and her
future, saying often to himself, "By and by. She will come to me by
and by, when I can be useful to her."

Meanwhile, Leam received his cares with the characteristic
indifference of youth for the attentions of age. She was not at the
back of the motives which promp