but wonderfully strange picture,
which riveted her attention and her sympathy. At last she went up to the
doorway, which was too low for her tall figure. Her heart shrunk
painfully within her, and she would have wished to grow smaller, and,
instead of shining in splendor, to have found herself wrapped in a
beggar's robe.

Could she step into this hovel decked with gold and jewels as if in
mockery?--like a tyrant who should feast at a groaning table and compel
the starving to look on at the banquet. Her delicate perception made her
feel what trenchant discord her appearance offered to all that surrounded
her, and the discord pained her; for she could not conceal from herself
that misery and external meanness were here entitled to give the key-note
and that her magnificence derived no especial grandeur from contrast with
all these modest accessories, amid dust, gloom, and suffering, but rather
became disproportionate and hideous, like a giant among pigmies.

She had already gone too far to turn back, or she would willingly have
done so. The longer she gazed into the but, the more deeply she felt the
impotence of her princely power, the nothingness of the splendid gifts
with which she approached it, and that she might not tread the dusty
floor of this wretched hovel but in all humility, and to crave a pardon.

The room into which she looked was low but not very small, and obtained
from two cross lights a strange and unequal illumination; on one side the
light came through the door, and on the other through an opening in the
time-worn ceiling of the room, which had never before harbored so many
and such different guests.

All attention was concentrated on a group, which was clearly lighted up
from the doorway.

On the dusty floor of the room cowered an old woman, with dark
weather-beaten features and tangled hair that had long been grey. Her
black-blue cotton shirt was open over her withered bosom, and showed a
blue star tattooed upon it.

In her lap she supported with her hands the head of a girl, whose slender
body lay motionless on a narrow, ragged mat. The little white feet of the
sick girl almost touched the threshold. Near to them squatted a
benevolent-looking old man, who wore only a coarse apron, and sitting all
in a heap, bent forward now and then, rubbing the child's feet with his
lean hands and muttering a few words to himself.

The sufferer wore nothing but a short petticoat of coarse light-blue
stuff. H