her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa
to trustful souls of the Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures
while she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung
up in her chamber.

The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
constellations which she bad seen shining brightly almost overhead in the
early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in the
very attitude in which she was sitting hours before. Her lamp had burned
out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber. She started to
find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by long remaining in
one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a great fear seized her,
and she sprang for a match. It broke with the quick movement she made to
kindle it, and she snatched another as if a fiend were after her. It
flashed and went out. Oh the terror, the terror! The darkness seemed
alive with fearful presences. The lurid glare of her own eyeballs
flashed backwards into her brain. She tried one more match; it kindled
as it should, and she lighted another lamp. Her first impulse was to
assure herself that nothing was changed in the familiar objects around
her. She held the lamp up to the picture of Judith Pride. The beauty
looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of lofty recognition in her
eyes; but there she was, as always. She turned the light upon the pale
face of the martyr-portrait. It looked troubled and faded, as it seemed
to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
childhood. Then she threw the light on the old chair, and, shuddering,
caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and
the flattened reptiles on which it stood.

In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting there,
still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors. Two
women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of
life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been what is called, in
our poor language, dead. One came in all the glory of her ripened
beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid
animal equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the
lusty lovers of complete muliebrity. The other,--how delicate, how
translucent, how aerial she seemed! yet real and true to the lineaments
of her whom the young girl looked upon as her hereditary protector.

The beautiful