"I wish I hadn't--if you don't like to know it, miss. But you
needn't mind. Lord--hee, hee!--I shall keep him waiting many a
year yet, bless ye!"

"I hope you will, I am sure."

The girl thereupon fell into such deep reflection that
conversation languished, and Grammer Oliver, taking her candle,
wished Miss Melbury good-night. The latter's eyes rested on the
distant glimmer, around which she allowed her reasoning fancy to
play in vague eddies that shaped the doings of the philosopher
behind that light on the lines of intelligence just received. It
was strange to her to come back from the world to Little Hintock
and find in one of its nooks, like a tropical plant in a hedge-
row, a nucleus of advanced ideas and practices which had nothing
in common with the life around. Chemical experiments, anatomical
projects, and metaphysical conceptions had found a strange home
here.

Thus she remained thinking, the imagined pursuits of the man
behind the light intermingling with conjectural sketches of his
personality, till her eyes fell together with their own heaviness,
and she slept.



CHAPTER VII.


Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer