figment of a disordered digestion, as the lusty hunger which willingly
appeased itself with the coffee of the St. Johnswort Inn sufficiently
testified. Yet, in spite of all this, an occurrence so out of the course
of events must have had some message for him, and it must have been his
fault that he could not divine it. A sense of culpability grew upon him
with the sense of his ignominy in cheapening it by making it subservient
to what he knew was, in the last analysis, a wretched vanity. At least he
could refuse himself that miserable gratification hereafter, and he got
back some measure of self-respect in forbidding himself the pleasure he
might have taken in being noted for a strange experience he could never
be got to speak of.




V.


The implication of any such study as this is that the subject of it is
continuously if not exclusively occupied with the matter which is
supposed to make him interesting. But of course it was not so with
Hewson, who perhaps did not think of his apparition once in a fortnight,
or oftener, say, than he thought of the odd girl with whom for no reason,
except contemporaneity in his acquaintance, he associated with it. If he
never thought of the apparition without subconsciously expecting its
return, he equally expected when he thought of Miss Hernshaw that the
chances of society would bring them together again, and it was with no
more surprise than if the vision had intimated its second approach that
he one night found her name in the minute envelope which the footman
presented him at a house where he was going to dine, and realized that he