influences, either breathed in with the fragrant air or taken with her
food. She fancied likewise, but it might be altogether fancy, that
there was a stirring up of her system,--a strange, indefinite
sensation creeping through her veins, and tingling, half painfully,
half pleasurably, at her heart. Still, whenever she dared to look into
the mirror, there she beheld herself pale as a white rose and with the
crimson birthmark stamped upon her cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it
so much as she.

To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary
to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana
turned over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old
tomes she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the
works of the philosophers of the Middle Ages, such as Albertus
Magnus[8], Cornelius Agrippa[9], Paracelsus[10], and the famous friar
who created the prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists
stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of
their credulity, and therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined
themselves to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power
above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world. Hardly
less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the
Transactions of the Royal Society[11], in which the members, knowing
little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually
recording wonders or proposing methods whereby wonders might be
wrought.

But, to Georgiana, the most engrossing volume was a large folio from
her husband's own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of
his scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its
development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances