n stood still a
short time, listening, with her trembling body pressed close against
the door, and her hands clenched on the latch. He walked slowly up a
few steps, and then paused again, as if he had suddenly become absorbed
in some dreamy thought. She shuddered, sighed heavily, and tottered
back into the sitting-room. Her dress seemed too tight for her, for she
slipped out of it like a butterfly from its chrysalis, and then in the
airiest night costume, sat down at the open piano. It was an old,
much-worn instrument, of very poor tone, and as she ran her slender
fingers lightly over the keys, it sounded in the entry outside like the
distant music of a harp.

The young man had just reached the topmost stair when he heard it.

"There! she is playing the sonata, after all," he said to himself. "A
strange, obstinate person. What can she have suffered from fate?
To-morrow I will take more notice of her. It's a pity she is so ugly,
and yet--what does it matter? There is a charm in her finger-tips. What
wonderful music!"

He stood still a moment listening to the familiar tones, which seemed
to express all the familiar thoughts that had been wandering in a
confused chaos through his mind. Suddenly he heard a voice from within.

"Is that you, Edwin?"

"Of course it is I," he replied.

The next instant he had opened the door and entered the room which was
brightly lighted by the moonbeams.

CHAPTER II.

This room, termed by its occupants' friends "the tun," was a large
three-windowed apartment, with walls painted light grey, a floor
scoured snow white, and over the windows instead of curtains, three
narrow green calico lambrequins of the simplest pattern. A desk stood
at the right-hand window, a small turning-lathe at the left, and in the
spaces between the casements two tall bookcases; there were two beds
placed against the wall, several cane chairs and small chests made of
white wood, and finally, a low, smoky ceiling, which here and there
showed large cracks, and threatened to fall. But the room, spite of
its simplicity, had an aristocratic air from the presence of two
copperplate engravings of Raphael's paintings, framed in plain
brown wood, that hung over the beds, and two antique busts on the
bookcases,--one a head of Aristotle, the other the gloomy-eyed,
stern-browed Demosthenes. Even the low stove was adorned with a piece
of sculpture at which no one is ever weary of gazin