THE following is from the lady’s journal:

“Yes, I will write it again, absurd though it may turn out to be: There is some mystery about this cabin. I have tried over and over to convince myself that my weakness and the unnatural situation in which I am placed make me morbid and suspicious; but I know that I am still a hard-headed woman, without a particle of nonsense in my composition; and I know that I am able to see things in their proper light, and to understand them in a way. And I say that the signs of something wrong here are growing more and more evident, without furnishing me the least clue to the nature of the mystery; but I feel that, whatever the mystery is, it is one to be dreaded. I try not to think about it; but where is the sense in that? Is it not better for me to do all the observing and thinking I can, and thus be the better prepared for whatever may happen.

“I sometimes try to think that it is only the strangeness of this strange man—if I may call him a man—that makes me feel a mystery in the air. It is hard to get hold of anything tangible in his bearing, so unobtrusively alert he is. There must be some explanation of the fact that a physician as skilful as he is should bury himself in these mountains—should hide himself from the different world to which he evidently belongs.

“He is a gentleman,—I will do him the justice to admit that. He is a great deal besides any gentleman that I have ever seen before. Let me try to explain this to myself. Although he makes not the slightest show of attending to my wants, I know his every thought is upon me. He sleeps on the stone floor in front of the fireplace,—that is, if he sleeps at all, which I sometimes doubt. Even when he is not looking at me in that distant, abstracted way that he has, I feel that the whole cabin is filled with his eyes, and that they are always looking at me, day and night, but with an expression different from the veiled one of his own eyes. They do not have the distant, thoughtful, perfunctory, business-like expression of the eyes in his head, but a different one,—an expression that seems to be a mixture of duty, pity, kindness, patience, forbearance, and—it will make me feel better to write it—contempt. I feel that these countless eyes are reading my deepest thoughts, and looking over my shoulder as I write.

“Of course I do not really feel all this, else I should not be writing thus. But I feel something. O God! when will this wretched strain be over?...

“I have discovered that he guards most jealously the back door of the cabin. When I first came to consciousness after my hurt, I saw what I took to be evidence that my strength of will was greater than his. I believe so yet; but he certainly has a way of baffling me and holding me in a position from which I cannot escape. I am curious to know a great many things; it is my right to know them. Why does he surround himself with a deafness that nothing can penetrate? Why and how does he make it impossible for me to ask him questions? And who ever heard of a man so supremely indifferent as not to ask a woman placed as I am a single question about herself, her life, her tastes, her family, her world? Why has he made it impossible for me to ask him any questions? At first he had placed my bed so that I could see the rear door by turning my head; but when he observed that I had become curious, he found an excuse to turn my bed so that it was impossible for me to see the door, and I was too proud to object.

“I wish I could have respect for him. Of course he surmises that I am wealthy, and he must know that he will be handsomely paid for his services. I gave him to understand as much one day, and he looked at me in a blank way that was most disconcerting. But that did not deceive me. I do not wish to be unjust, but I know something about human nature. I think that the man’s whole course may be to impress me with his great solicitude and make his services appear the more valuable. Bah! he needn’t have gone to the trouble.

“I am going to watch that door in spite of him. I know already that he keeps it carefully locked, and that when he goes out he bars it on the other side. Such distrust, when I am so unable to pry into his secrets, is unwarranted and offensive. Another thing I have noted. The back door leads into some kind of inner apartment.

“How is he going to guard it when I am able to be about? Then his life will be a burden. I will make it so.

“Gratitude? Oh, yes! I have heard of such a thing. But this is an obligation that money can discharge, and I will see that it does. Has he done anything more for me than a physician ought to do? I am familiar with the ways in which these gentry play upon the gratitude of their wealthy patients, and present bills that they think a sense of shame will accept. So long as the rich are the prey of the poor, the poor need not expect sympathy from the rich. I know the power of money to secure attendance of all sorts, and I can see its power manifested now.

“This man seems to be utterly lacking in masculine qualities. To give an illustration: The other day, when he thought I was absorbed in reading,—I must say that he has excellent taste in books,—I found tears trickling down his cheeks while he was reading before the fire. I noted from the division of the book as he held it open the approximate place where he was reading. Afterward I asked him for the book, and found that it opened readily at a place where the leaves were tear-stained. It was the silliest story imaginable,—a foolish account of true-lovers separated by designing persons and dying of a broken heart! Imagine a grown man crying over such nonsense as that!

“Here is a queer circumstance that I have noted, and have wondered about: In not a single one of Dr. Malbone’s books does his name appear; and it is evident that wherever it did appear he has erased it. There may be easy ways of accounting for this, but to me it looks suspicious. Is it a part of the mystery of a refined and skilful physician burying—I believe hiding—himself in these mountains? I remember to have heard at the lakes that he never attended city people spending the summer here if he could avoid it. I certainly know that he refused to visit me, and that he sent me an insulting message besides. What is the reason? Is he more or less acquainted with people of the better class, and is he afraid of meeting some whom he may have known when he lived somewhere else and passed under a different name? The inhabitants of these mountains venerate him, and believe that his skill is omnipotent. Well, I have nothing to say against his skill, for certainly he has handled my case perfectly; but if these simple and ignorant mountain-folk should see him in the intimacy in which I know him, and discover what a cold, suspicious, weak, petty man he is, I think they would reform their opinion of him.

“During the last month he has been going oftener and oftener through the back door. What business has he there? If I did not have a feeling that, little as he trusts me, I might safely trust him to the end of the world, I would have a fear for my own safety. But I rest secure in the belief that the prospect of collecting a generous fee for restoring me safe to my father is a sufficient protection, to say nothing of the confidence that I have in the man’s queer sense of honor. Why, he treats me as though I were a queen, and bears himself as my humblest subject hanging upon my smallest word—up to a certain point. Beyond that I get bewildered.

“Oh, my father, my father! There is no man in the world like you, none that knows me, that loves me as you do! If you only knew how my heart yearns every moment for you! Why could not this man have the least of your qualities,—your iron will, your scorn of weak things in human nature, your dominating, achieving power It is in comparing this man with you that I find him so small, so pusillanimous, so different from the standard of manhood that you have made me adopt, so different from me, so infinitely far from me. It is good that it is so, but it makes me lonely beyond all expression. I would rather be alone in a desert than with this strange mirage of a man, this male with an infinite capacity for the little things that only little women are suited to do. He tortures me with his goodness, his self-sacrifice to me, his making me feel that he lives only to make me comfortable and bring me back to health. Where are you, my father? I know that you will come to me when you can. That much I know, I know! Come, father, and take me from this awful prison!...

“I think I have done remarkably well to be as patient as I have been. This horrid food is enough to kill a healthy woman,—tinned meats and vegetables, tinned everything, and hardly any flour, but sea-biscuits instead! Of course my poor slave does his best to prepare things in such a way that it will be possible for me to eat them, for he seems to realize that I am a human being....

“I am determined to bring this man to an acquaintance with his tongue. The loneliness that I feel is unbearable. He must be as lonely as I, and, like me, he is probably too proud to make a sign. Of course he talks to me now when I make him, but about things in Asia or Africa that I am certain are as dull to him as to me. He is maintaining this distance, I am certain, just to guard his history and true character, and to keep me in a position where it will remain impossible for me to find out what is going forward on the other side of that door. I will talk to him about myself; that will compel him to talk about himself. I can’t bear this isolation. It is inhuman. And I have no fears that he will presume. They passed long ago.

“I have just two more things to record at present. One is that my host is growing thinner and more hollow-eyed, and the other is that several times lately I have dreamed of hearing the strangest and sweetest music. It sounded like the playing of a violin by a master hand. I have been unable to determine whether I was really dreaming. One singular thing in connection with it is that when I looked for him the other night on his rugs before the fire after I had heard the music, or dreamed I heard it, he was not there. I tried to remain awake until he returned, for I wondered where he could be in the middle of the night, with the snow heaped up to the roof of the house and a fearful gale blowing cold outside, and I felt lonely and uneasy. But I went to sleep before he returned. I have no doubt, however, that he was on the other side of the rear door.”

This ends, for the present, the extracts from the lady’s journal.