'Another, Ida!'
'Beverley.'
'What madness is this?' asked Clare, regarding her sister's face with great and deep anxiety.
'I loved Beverley as I never loved Jerry; it was, indeed, the passion which Scott describes as given by God alone:
'"It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind."
Beverley's last words were that we should meet again; and we have met again—nay, seem to be always meeting in my thoughts by day and dreams by night; but always the memory of him was most vivid when Jerry Vane was near me or in my mind.'
'How will all this end?' said Clare, in a voice of sorrow. 'I would that papa were here.'
'He had never much sympathy with, or toleration for, my grief, and now that it is passing away, he would have still less with these secret thoughts or strange impressions I have told to you, dear Clare, and even hinted at to Trevor Chute.'
'It is a disease of the mind, Ida; but all this seems so incomprehensible to me. Surely we have power and will over our own acts, and even in these days, when so much is said, thought, written—yes, and practised too, about spiritualism, mysticism, etc., there is the danger of adopting that as an inevitable law to which we must conform, but which we should with all our power resist as the vilest of superstition.'
Ida only shook her head mournfully, and poor Clare's motherly and sisterly heart was stirred within her. She knew not what to think; but she clung to the hope that ultimately a marriage with Jerry Vane would dissipate these morbid impressions with which the mind of Ida had become so singularly and so strongly imbued.