Let me recommend this book,--one of the most remarkable ever penned.

It is Winwood Reade's 'Martyrdom of Man.' I shall be back in an hour." I sat in the window with the volume in my hand, but my thoughts were far from the daring speculations of the writer.

My mind ran upon our late visitor,--her smiles, the deep rich tones of her voice, the strange mystery which overhung her life.

If she were seventeen at the time of her father's disappearance she must be seven-and-twenty now,--a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience.

So I sat and mused, until such dangerous thoughts came into my head that I hurried away to my desk and plunged furiously into the latest treatise upon pathology.