Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/198

186 inviolate within that sealed enclosure. How, I do not pretend to say.

It was but a little thing, yet it affected me more than a greater might have done. A succession of “trifles light as air” may unsettle the best balanced mind. One begins, by degrees, to have a feeling that something is taking place, or is about to take place, of a character to which one is unaccustomed. And under such circumstances the unaccustomed, particularly when one is unable to even dimly apprehend the form which it may take, one instinctively resents.

I decided that, at any rate, that should be the last appearance of the God of Fortune. Taking it from Miss Blyth, who yielded it readily enough, I walked with it to the fire, intending to make an end of it by burning. As I went something pricked my fingers so suddenly, and so sharply, that in my surprise and, I might add, pain, the doll dropped from my hand. When we came to look for it it was not to be found. We searched under tables and chairs in all possible and impossible places, with a degree of eagerness which approached the ludicrous, without success. The God of Fortune had disappeared.

I am reluctant to confess how much I was disconcerted by so trivial an occurrence.

I must have been- orbidly disposed; still liverish. That is the only explanation which I can offer why I should all at once have felt so strongly that everything connected with Mr. Benjamin Batters’ testamentary dispositions wore a malign aspect. I was even haunted—the word is used advisedly—by a wholly unreasonable conviction that Miss Blyth was being dragged into a position of imminent peril.

This foolishness of mine was rendered more ridiculous by the fact that Miss Blyth’s own mood was all the other way. And in this respect Miss Purvis was at one with her. Somewhat to my surprise