A little more than an hour after this he stood in the parlour of Doctor Tarrant's suburban residence, in Monadnoc Place. He had induced a juvenile maid-servant, by an appeal somewhat impassioned, to let the ladies know that he was there; and she had returned, after a long absence, to say that MissTarrant would come down to him in a little while. He possessed himself, according to his wont, ofthe nearest book (it lay on the table, with an old magazine and a little japanned tray containingTarrant's professional cards-his denomination as a mesmeric healer), and spent ten minutes inturning it over. It was a biography of Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, the celebrated trance-lecturer, and wasembellished by a portrait representing the lady with a surprised expression and innumerable ringlets.Ransom said to himself, after reading a few pages, that much ridicule had been cast upon Southernliterature; but if that was a fair specimen of Northern!-and he threw it back upon the table with agesture almost as contemptuous as if he had not known perfectly, after so long a residence in theNorth, that it was not, while he wondered whether this was the sort of thing Miss Tarrant had beenbrought up on. There was no other book to be seen, and he remembered to have read the magazine;so there was finally nothing for him, as the occupants of the house failed still to appear, but to starebefore him, into the bright, bare, common little room, which was so hot that he wished to open awindow, and of which an ugly, undraped cross-light seemed to have taken upon itself to reveal thepoverty. Ransom, as I have mentioned, had not a high standard of comfort and noticed little, usually, how people's houses were furnished-it was only when they were very pretty that heobserved; but what he saw while he waited at Doctor Tarrant's made him say to himself that it wasno wonder Verena liked better to live with Olive Chancellor. He even began to wonder whether itwere for the sake of that superior softness she had cultivated Miss Chancellor's favour, and whetherMrs. Luna had been right about her being mercenary and insincere. So many minutes elapsed beforeshe appeared that he had time to remember he really knew nothing to the contrary, as well as toconsider the oddity (so great when one did consider it) of his coming out to Cambridge to see her, when he had only a few hours in Boston to spare, a year and a half after she had given him her verycasual invitation. She had not refused to receive him, at any rate; she was free to, if it didn't pleaseher. And not only this, but she was apparently making herself fine in his honour, inasmuch as heheard a rapid footstep move to and fro above his head, and even, through the slightness which inMonadnoc Place did service for an upper floor, the sound of drawers and presses opened andclosed. Some one was "flying round," as they said in Mississippi. At last the stairs creaked under alight tread, and the next moment a brilliant person came into the r