mentioned this to you. Well, the next morning, as I went to mail my
letter, I overtook Miss Daw on the road to Rye, where the post-
office is, and accompanied her thither and back, an hour's walk.
The conversation again turned to you, and again I remarked that
inexplicable look of interest which had lighted up her face the
previous evening. Since then, I have seen Miss Daw perhaps ten
times, perhaps oftener, and on each occasion I found that when I
was not speaking of you, or your sister, or some person or place
associated with you, I was not holding her attention. She would be
absent-minded, her eyes would wander away from me to the sea, or to
some distant object in the landscape; her fingers would play with
the leaves of a book in a way that convinced me she was not
listening. At these moments if I abruptly changed the theme--I did
it several times as an experiment--and dropped some remark about my
friend Flemming, then the sombre blue eyes would come back to me
instantly.

Now, is not this the oddest thing in the world? No, not the oddest.
The effect which you tell me was produced on you by my casual
mention of an unknown girl swinging in a hammock is certainly as
strange. You can conjecture how that passage in your letter of
Friday startled me. Is it possible, than, that two people who have
never met, and who are hundreds of miles apart, can exert a
magnetic influence on each other? I have read of such psychological
phenomena, but never credited them. I leave the solution of the
problem to you. As for myself, all other things being favorable, it
would be impossible for me to fall in love with a woman who listens
to me only when I am talking of my friend!

I am not aware that any one is paying marked attention to my fair