'"Do you know Raxton?" I said.
'At first he seemed to hesitate about his reply, and then said,
'"No, I do not."
'I then told him in as few words as I could our adventures on the sands on the night of the landslip, and my search for my father's body afterwards, until I suddenly sank down in a fit. When I had finished Mr. D'Arcy was silent, and was evidently lost in thought. At last he said,
'"My story, I perceive, cannot begin where yours breaks off. I first became acquainted with you in the studio of a famous painter named Wilderspin, one of the noblest-minded and most admirable men now breathing, but a great eccentric."
'"Why, Mr. D'Arcy, I never was in a studio in my life until to-day,"
I said.
'"You mean, Miss Wynne, that you were not consciously there," he said. "But in that studio you certainly were, and the artist, who reverenced you as a being from another world, was painting your face in a beautiful picture. While he was doing this you were taken seriously ill, and your life was despaired of. It was then that I brought you into the country, and here you have been living and benefiting by the kind services of Mrs. Titwing for a long time."
'"And you know nothing of my history previously to seeing me in the
London studio?" I asked.
'"All that I could ever learn about that," said he, in what seemed to me a rather evasive tone, "I had to gather from the incoherent and rambling talk of Wilderspin, a religious enthusiast whose genius is very nearly akin to mania. He was so struck by you that he actually believed you to be not a corporeal woman at all; he believed you had been sent from the spirit-world by his dead mother to enable him to paint a great picture."
'"Oh, I must see him, and make him tell me all," I said.