Heart and Science | Page 6

may watch, through the railings of the squares,
children at play on grass that almost glows with the lustre of the Sussex
Downs. This haven of rest is alike out of the way of fashion and
business; and is yet within easy reach of the one and the other. Ovid
paused in a vast and silent square. If his little cousin had lived, he
might perhaps have seen his children at play in some such secluded
place as this.

The birds were singing blithely in the trees. A tradesman's boy,
delivering fish to the cook, and two girls watering flowers at a window,
were the only living creatures near him, as he roused himself and
looked around.
Where was the College? Where were the Curator and the Specimen?
Those questions brought with them no feeling of anxiety or surprise.
He turned, in a half-awakened way, without a wish or a purpose--turned,
and listlessly looked back.
Two foot-passengers, dressed in mourning garments, were rapidly
approaching him. One of them, as they came nearer, proved to be an
aged woman. The other was a girl.
He drew aside to let them pass. They looked at him with the lukewarm
curiosity of strangers, as they went by. The girl's eyes and his met.
Only the glance of an instant--and its influence held him for life.
She went swiftly on, as little impressed by the chance meeting as the
old woman at her side. Without stopping to think--without being
capable of thought--Ovid followed them. Never before had he done
what he was doing now; he was, literally, out of himself. He saw them
ahead of him, and he saw nothing else.
Towards the middle of the square, they turned aside into a street on the
left. A concert-hall was in the street--with doors open for an afternoon
performance. They entered the hall. Still out of himself, Ovid followed
them.
CHAPTER III.
A room of magnificent size; furnished with every conventional luxury
that money can buy; lavishly provided with newspapers and books of
reference; lighted by tall windows in the day-time, and by gorgeous
chandeliers at night, may be nevertheless one of the dreariest places of
rest and shelter that can be found on the civilised earth. Such places
exist, by hundreds, in those hotels of monstrous proportions and
pretensions, which now engulf the traveller who ends his journey on

the pier or the platform. It may be that we feel ourselves to be strangers
among strangers--it may be that there is something innately repellent in
splendid carpets and curtains, chairs and tables, which have no social
associations to recommend them--it may be that the mind loses its
elasticity under the inevitable restraint on friendly communication,
which expresses itself in lowered tones and instinctive distrust of our
next neighbour; but this alone is certain: life, in the public
drawing-room of a great hotel, is life with all its healthiest emanations
perishing in an exhausted receiver.
On the same day, and nearly at the same hour, when Ovid had left his
house, two women sat in a corner of the public room, in one of the
largest of the railway hotels latterly built in London.
Without observing it themselves, they were objects of curiosity to their
fellow-travellers. They spoke to each other in a foreign language. They
were dressed in deep mourning--with an absence of fashion and a
simplicity of material which attracted the notice of every other woman
in the room. One of them wore a black veil over her gray hair. Her
hands were brown, and knotty at the joints; her eyes looked unnaturally
bright for her age; innumerable wrinkles crossed and re-crossed her
skinny face; and her aquiline nose (as one of the ladies present took
occasion to remark) was so disastrously like the nose of the great Duke
of Wellington as to be an offensive feature in the face of a woman.
The lady's companion, being a man, took a more merciful view. "She
can't help being ugly," he whispered. "But see how she looks at the girl
with her. A good old creature, I say, if ever there was one yet." The
lady eyed him, as only a jealous woman can eye her husband, and
whispered back, "Of course you're in love with that slip of a girl!"
She was a slip of a girl--and not even a tall slip. At seventeen years of
age, it was doubtful whether she would ever grow to a better height.
But a girl who is too thin, and not even so tall as the Venus de' Medici,
may still be possessed of personal attractions. It was not altogether a
matter of certainty, in this case, that the attractions were sufficiently
remarkable to excite general admiration. The fine colour and the plump

healthy cheeks, the broad smile, and