'I am conscious of it repeatedly,' she continued with a strange and sad smile.
'In the midst of an animated conversation, I have all at once perceived your thoughts to wander, an expression of alarm to creep over your face, a kind of shudder through your frame, and your hand to tremble.'
'It is so.'
'And this sudden emotion, Ida?
'Comes when I think of Beverley—or, rather, this emotion, which I can neither avert nor control, makes me think of him even when my thoughts have been elsewhere.'
'This is very strange,' said Trevor Chute, as some of what he deemed Beverley's 'wild speeches' came back to memory again.
'Strange indeed, Trevor; but morbid thoughts come over me, with the thrill you have remarked, even in the sunshine and when with others, but more especially when I am alone; and there seems to be—oh, Trevor Chute, I know not how to phrase it, lest you think me absurd or eccentric,' she continued, while a wild, sad earnestness stole into her eyes, 'that there hovers near me, and unknown to all, a spirit—a something that is unseen and intangible.'
'This is but overheated fancy,' said Chute tenderly, and with commiseration; 'you should be alone as seldom as possible, and change of air and scene will cure you of all this gloom. On my return—if I should return to London—I shall hope to hear that you are, as you used to be, the bright and happy Ida of my own brighter and happier days.'
And rising now, he lingered with Ida's hand in his, intent on departure, as his last orders to his valet had been to pack at once for France or Germany; and Tom Travers, a faithful fellow, whose discharge he had bought from the Guards, and who had been with him in India and everywhere else, was fully engaged on that duty by this time.
'But, dear Ida,' he said, 'dismiss as soon as you can these gloomy ideas from your mind, and cease to imagine that anything so unnatural, so repugnant to the fixed laws of nature, as aught hovering near you unseen, forcing you to think of Beverley, could exist.'