“Not in the least.”
“I am glad to hear that. She is a charming creature, Mrs. Crayford. She interests me indescribably. If I was only twenty years younger—perhaps (as I am not twenty years younger) I had better not finish the sentence? Is it indiscreet, my dear lady, to inquire what is the matter with her?”
“It might be indiscreet, on the part of a stranger,” said Mrs. Crayford. “An old friend like you may make any inquiries. I wish I could tell you what is the matter with Clara. It is a mystery to the doctors themselves. Some of the mischief is due, in my humble opinion, to the manner in which she has been brought up.”
“Ay! ay! A bad school, I suppose.”
“Very bad, Captain Helding. But not the sort of school which you have in your mind at this moment. Clara’s early years were spent in a lonely old house in the Highlands of Scotland. The ignorant people about her were the people who did the mischief which I have just been speaking of. They filled her mind with the superstitions which are still respected as truths in the wild North—especially the superstition called the Second Sight.”
“God bless me!” cried the captain, “you don’t mean to say she believes in such stuff as that? In these enlightened times too!”
Mrs. Crayford looked at her partner with a satirical smile.
“In these enlightened times, Captain Helding, we only believe in dancing tables, and in messages sent from the other world by spirits who can’t spell! By comparison with such superstitions as these, even the Second Sight has something—in the shape of poetry—to recommend it, surely? Estimate for yourself,” she continued seriously, “the effect of such surroundings as I have described on a delicate, sensitive young creature—a girl with a naturally imaginative temperament leading a lonely, neglected life. Is it so very surprising that she should catch the infection of the superstition about her? And is it quite incomprehensible that her nervous system should suffer accordingly, at a very critical period of her life?”
“Not at all, Mrs. Crayford—not at all, ma’am, as you put it. Still it is a little startling, to a commonplace man like me, to meet a young lady at a ball who believes in the Second Sight. Does she really profess to see into the future? Am I to understand that she positively falls into a trance, and sees people in distant countries, and foretells events to come? That is the Second Sight, is it not?”
“That is the Second Sight, captain. And that is, really and positively, what she does.”