the wand, I felt a wild thrill through my frame. I recoiled; I was
alarmed lest (according to the plain common-sense theory of Julius Faber)
I might be preparing my imagination to form and to credit its own
illusions. Hastily I laid down the wand. But then it occurred to me that
whatever its properties, it had so served the purposes of the dread
Fascinator from whom it had been taken, that he might probably seek to
repossess himself of it; he might contrive to enter my house in my
absence; more prudent to guard in my own watchful keeping the
incomprehensible instrument of incomprehensible arts. I resolved,
therefore, to take the wand with me, and placed it in my travelling-trunk,
with such effects as I selected for use in the excursion that was to
commence with the morrow. I now lay down to rest, but I could not sleep.
The recollections of the painful interview with Mrs. Poyntz became vivid
and haunting. It was clear that the sentiment she had conceived for me
was that of no simple friendship,--something more or something less, but
certainly something else; and this conviction brought before me that proud
hard face, disturbed by a pang wrestled against but not subdued, and that
clear metallic voice, troubled by the quiver of an emotion which, perhaps,
she had never analyzed to herself. I did not need her own assurance to
know that this sentiment was not to be confounded with a love which she
would have despised as a weakness and repelled as a crime; it was an
inclination of the intellect, not a passion of the heart. But still it
admitted a jealousy little less keen than that which has love for its
cause,--so true it is that jealousy is never absent where self-love is
always present. Certainly, it was no susceptibility of sober friendship
which had made the stern arbitress of a coterie ascribe to her interest
in me her pitiless judgment of Lilian. Strangely enough, with the image
of this archetype of conventional usages and the trite social life, came
that of the mysterious Margrave, surrounded by all the attributes with
which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy border-land that lies