The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel B0082RD4EM

wing, either at home or abroad. Most of Ruth's life has been passed over here. I trust to your discretion. You will perceive the necessity of keeping all this to yourself."
    "I do, and I now see that your travelling with the Denhams is a circumstance in no way connected with the state of Miss Denham's health."
    "Not in the most distant manner, Mr. Lynde. I am with them because they are my old friends. I was worn out with professional work, and I ran across the sea to recuperate. It is fortunate I did, since Ruth chances to need me."
    Lynde pondered a moment, and then asked abruptly: "Does Mrs. Denham know of my former meeting with her niece?"
    "I never breathed a word to Mrs. Denham on the subject of Ruth's escapade," replied the doctor. "It would have pained her without mending matters. Besides, I was not proud of that transaction."
    Mrs. Denham's suppression of the doctor's name, then, in speaking of him to Lynde, had been purely accidental.
    "Miss Ruth's strange hallucination, in her illness, as to personality, her fancy about the Queen of Sheba—what was that traceable to?" asked Lynde, after a pause.
    "Heaven only knows. She was reading the Old Testament very much in those days. I have sometimes accepted that as an explanation. It often happens that a delusion takes its cue from something read, or thought, or experienced in a rational state. In the case of the man Blaisdell, for example—you remember him, with his marble ship? He was formerly an enterprising ship-builder; during the Southern war he filled a contract with government for a couple of ironclads, and made his fortune. The depression in shipping afterwards ruined him—and he fell to constructing marble vessels! He is dead, by the way. I wonder if his reason has been given back to him—in that other world."
    Lynde did not speak immediately, and the doctor relighted his cigar, which had gone out.
    "Dr. Pendegrast, you have lifted a crushing weight from me. I cannot explain it to you now and here; but you shall know some day."
    Dr. Pendegrast smiled. "I didn't recollect you at first, Mr. Lynde; my memory for names and faces is shockingly derelict, but I have retained most of my other faculties in tolerably good order. I have been unreserved with you because I more than suspect"—
    The doctor's sentence was cut short by Mr. Denham, who entered at the instant. He had learned that there was no train for Geneva before the night-express. Lynde lighted the cigar which he had been unconsciously holding between his fingers all this while, and on the plea of cashing a draft at a banker's left the two gentlemen together. He wandered absently into the Place de la Concorde, crossed the crowded bridge there, and plunged into the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. Finding his way back after an hour or so to the other bank of the Seine, he seated himself on one of those little black iron chairs which seem to have let themselves down like spiders from the lime-trees in the Champs Elysees, and remained for a long time in a deep study.
    The meeting with Dr. Pendegrast had been so severe a shock to Lynde that he could not straightway recover his mental balance. The appalling shadow which the doctor's presence had for the moment thrown across him had left Lynde benumbed and chilled despite the reassuring sunshine of the doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed to life again; his gloom slipped off and was lost in the restless tides of life which surged about him. It was the hour when Paris sits at small green tables in front of the cafes and sips its absinthe or cassis; when the boulevards are thronged, and the rich equipages come and go. There was not a cloud in the tender blue sky against which the reddish obelisk of Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing in the Place de la Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view the gray facade of the gutted palace, still standing there, calcined and cracked by the fires of the Commune. Presently all this began to distract him, and when he returned to the hotel he was in a humor that would have been comparatively tranquil if so many tedious miles had not stretched between Paris and Chamouni.
    He found Mr. Denham and Dr. Pendegrast delaying dinner for him. After dinner, seeing no prospect of renewing conversation in private with the doctor, Lynde killed the time by writing a voluminous letter to Flemming, whose name he had