how to reach my dear boy, I
should not importune you. Bertie would not refuse obedience to say
wishes."

The silence which followed was so prolonged that a mouse crept from its
covert in some corner of the comfortless garret room, and nibbled at
the fragments of bread scattered on the table.

Beryl stood at the dormer window, holding aside the faded blue cotton
curtain, and the mid-day glare falling upon her, showed every curve of
her tall full form; every line in the calm, pale Sibylline face. The
large steel gray eyes were shaded by drooping lids, heavily fringed
with black lashes, but when raised in a steady gaze the pupils appeared
abnormally dilated; and the delicately traced black brows that
overarched them, contrasted conspicuously with the wealth of deep
auburn hair darkened by mahogany tints, which rolled back in shining
waves from her blue veined temples. While moulding the figure and
features upon a scale almost heroic, nature had jealously guarded the
symmetry of her work, and in addition to the perfect proportion of the
statuesque outlines, had bestowed upon the firm white flesh a gleaming
smoothness, suggestive of fine grained marble highly polished. Majesty
of mien implies much, which the comparatively short period of eighteen
years rarely confers, yet majestic most properly describes this girl,
whose archetype Veleda read runic myths to the Bructeri in the twilight
of history.

Beryl crossed the room, and with her hands folded tightly together,
came to the low bed, on which lay the wreck of a once beautiful woman,
and stood for a moment silent and pre-occupied. With a sudden gesture
of surrender, she stooped her noble head, as if assuming a yoke, and
drew one long deep breath. Did some prophetic intuition show her at
that instant the Phicean Hill and its dread tenant, which sooner or
later we must all confront?

"Dear mother, I submit. Obedience to your commands certainly ought not
to lead me astray; yet I feel that I stand at the cross-roads, longing
to turn and flee from the way whither your finger points. I have no
hope of accomplishing any good, and nothing but humiliation can result
from the experiment; but I will go. Sometimes I believe; that fate
maliciously hunts up the things we most bitterly abhor, and one by one
sets them down before us--labelled Duty. When do you wish me to start?"

"To-night, at nine o'clock. In the letter which you will take to
father, I have told him our destitution