clear echoes, a ringing musical chopping; and having secured his aid, they exerted all their strength, raised the senseless man to the saddle, and led him home.

Physicians were soon summoned, but Redruth bethought himself of a nurse tenderer than the others, though so far away, and wrote that night to St. Denys, directing his letter by the one he had found on the clavichord. Scarcely had the mail time to reach the Castle and return, when Miriam and St. Denys stood by the sick man's bedside.

XIII.

HALCYON DAYS.

IR ROHAN lay prostrate under a fierce fever;

STR

only a constitution of iron strength, wiry and elastic, could have arisen from it. For many days the unrelenting heats stung him along narrow ways. Goaded, parched, and panting, at last sleep overtook him; the delirium consumed itself; and waking, purposeless and dejected, life fluttering at his pulse for release, as he hung in the balance of Fate, he found the Ghost gone. It were an idle speculation to question if she found sorrow in the work imposed upon her or self-assumed,—she was flown with her battalia to assist his other enemy.

As his languid eyes opened, and he slowly received perception of what he saw, Miriam, sitting at a low table with her needle, seemed as much an apparition as all things else; and again he suffered the weary lids to fall. But she had seen the

glance, and rising with her sweet smile, came toward him, moistened his lips with the cordial, rearranged the pillows while the physician raised him, welcomed him back to life with low happy tones; and as he raised his eyes again, met them with so kind a gaze, so pitying, so tender, that his faint heart trembled in his throat.

Some change he felt in her nevertheless; what, he could not trouble himself to find, but a happy one; and at all events, she was here, she was real, the Ghost would never display her in this guise. It was St. Denys, too, entering now, frank, warmhearted, rejoicing, reassuring him, and bringing smiles to his pale lips. He was right, he said to himself; he knew Miriam would free him. Too weak to be glad, he only felt the vacancy left around him, as one dwelling on the coast misses, when travelling inland, the measured beat upon the rocks, the distant whisper of the surf along the sand. But with these brief hints of the Ghost, his heart beat so hotly that, life now again invaluable, he was forced to cease all thought and abandon himself to the luxury of repose, of receiving care, of seeing Miriam.

Day by day now brought returning strength,

health flowed back in its old channels, he sat up several hours. During this halcyon period, Miriam read to him what was to be found,—a task that perhaps she would not have chosen to please herself alone, reading just light enough to beguile his mind, while the musical accent soothed his ear; or recited, in the twilight, pastorals slipping along a stream of smooth vowels, that she had picked up somewhere in her wanderings, or ballads whose breath was a lengthened sigh,—recited them, till from their dim and tearful atmosphere she seemed only to have taken shape for the nonce. She surrounded him with sweet-smelling flowers, served his dainty diet with a fastidious grace peculiar to herself, ransacked her brain for devices against monotony. Always she had a treasury of sparkling gossip on which to draw, till judging he had heard enough. She imparted health as a heated iron imparts caloric.

Before long she ceased to be with him so much, and very soon Sir Rohan found means to descend to the drawing-room for a part of every day. Then with St. Denys they drove out in the open evergreen glades of the park, imbibing health, though scarcely equal strength, from the sweet resinous

perfume that loaded the air, where the sun had lain all day on the pines, more richly than that of orange-groves. Or in the clear mornings Miriam drove him into the neighboring town, where the gay colors and voices, the bustle and merriment, consequent on the autumn fairs, pleased him like a child, and full of jokes and glee he assisted in the shopping, and manifested the airy sportfulness of a boy, relapsing into completest fatigue after the first draught of exhilaration. It was soon decided that, when able to travel, he should return with his guests to Kent, spending the winter there; and meanwhile, for a man thus palpitating from recent misery, this was bliss enough.

Autumn now was at its height. The woods of beech and elm had burned themselves away like the funeral pyre of Summer, the oaks were yet brown, and the sky a perfect blue full of softer shades round the horizon. With Miriam by his side, Sir Rohan, believing himself almost restored, enjoyed the air, the quiet, when one afternoon Arundel was announced. Before he greeted the others, by more than a familiar nod, he walked toward Sir Rohan.

"It was a great liberty I took, sir," he said, in