when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with Weyburn,
until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away
in the society of the steadiest.

He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight. For if one
is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and enters
us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has us as a
foe. The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an intimate
knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within. Safest for him,
after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant person he
was, both there and anywhere else. The Countess of Ormont's manner
toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he should
follow; and he thanked her. He could not quite so sincerely thank her
aunt. His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to him
sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account of
services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.

Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.

Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every shaft
of the quiver of the rays at her disposal? Or was it a shot from a
powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine. Those
eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in a