from her home. He, alone, of all the more influential magnates of the
town, had upheld her innocence against the gossips that aspersed it; and
during the last trying year of my residence at L----, he had sought me,
with frank and manly confessions of his regret for his former prejudice
against me, and assurances of the respect in which he had held me ever
since my marriage--marriage but in rite--with Lilian. He had then, strong
in his ruling passion, besought me to consult his clairvoyants as to her
case. I declined this invitation so as not to affront him,--declined it,
not as I should once have done, but with no word nor look of incredulous
disdain. The fact was, that I had conceived a solemn terror of all
practices and theories out of the beaten track of sense and science.
Perhaps in my refusal I did wrong. I know not. I was afraid of my own
imagination. He continued not less friendly in spite of my refusal. And,
such are the vicissitudes in human feeling, I parted from him whom I had
regarded as my most bigoted foe with a warmer sentiment of kindness than
for any of those on whom I had counted on friendship. He had not deserted
Lilian. It was not so with Mrs. Poyntz. I would have paid tenfold the
value of the testimonial to have erased, from the list of those who
subscribed to it, her husband's name.

The day before I quitted L----, and some weeks after I had, in fact,
renounced my practice, I received an urgent entreaty from Miss Brabazon to
call on her. She wrote in lines so blurred that I could with difficulty
decipher them, that she was very ill, given over by Dr. Jones, who had
been attending her. She implored my opinion.




CHAPTER LXVII.