complete it.

Beside a bier knelt a winged figure, in act of stealing the rigid form,
and to the awful yet strangely beautiful face of the messenger of
gloom, she had given the streaming hair, the sunken, cavernous but
wonderfully radiant eyes of Moritz Retzsch's weird image of Death. A
white butterfly fluttered upward, and in mid-air--neither descending
nor drifting, but waiting--poised on outspread pinions, hovered the
Angel of the Resurrection holding out his hands. Behind and beneath the
Destroyer, rolled dense shadows, and all the light in this picture
rayed out from the plumes above, and fell like a glory on the baby's
face.

Cut off from all congenial companionship, thrown upon her own mental
resources, the prisoner had learned to live in an ideal world; and her
artistic tastes proved an indestructible heritage of comfort, while
memory ministered lavishly with images from the crowded realm of
aesthetics. Victorious over the stony limitations of dungeon walls and
dungeon discipline, fetterless imagination soared into the kingdom of
beauty, and fed her lonely soul, as Syrian ravens fed God's prophet.

Fourteen months had passed since Mr. Dunbar walked away from this cell,
after the interview relative to Gen'l Darrington's will; and though his
longing to see the prisoner had driven him twice to the entrance of the
chapel, whence he heard the marvellously sweet voice, and gazed at the
figure before the organ, no word was exchanged.

To-day, with his hand on the bolt of the door, and his heart in his
eyes, he leaned against the facing, and through the opening studied the
occupant of the cell that held the one treasure which fate had denied
him.

The ravages of disease, the blemish of acute physical suffering had
vanished; the clear pallor of her complexion, the full white throat,
the rounded contour of the graceful form, bespoke complete restoration
of all the vital forces; and never had she appeared so incomparably
beautiful.

Oppressed by the heat, she had pushed back the hair from her temples,
and though hopeless sadness reigned over the profound repose of her
features, the expression of her eyes told that the dream of the artist
had borne her beyond surrounding ills.

Where the button of her blue homespun dress fastened the collar, she
wore a sprig of heliotrope and a cluster of mignonette, from the
shallow box in the window-ledge where they grew together.

How long he stood there, surrendering himself