eus's boon to
mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of
vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the
ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen
away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked
by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which
the fire was replenished. The door to the closet was gone, and in its
recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while Henrietta's scant wardrobe
was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. The long, cobweb-hung
windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface
against the batten shutters.

All these details I could descry but dimly by the light of the smoking
oil-lamp that sat on the mantelshelf above the stove, and which cast a
ghastly light upon a row of empty bottles--the sole burden of the once
spotless, but now sadly soiled, vestal virgins.

Henrietta was bending over the smoking skillet, with the lamp-light
falling across her pale face. As she boiled the coffee and fried the
eggs I studied her profile sketched against the blue, smoky background,
and tried in vain to grasp the secret of its fleeting, evanescent
beauty. For beautiful Henrietta was--beautiful with a beauty quite her
own and all the more potent because of its very indefinableness. I
watched her as one horribly fascinated,--that high, wide white forehead,
that weak chin, those soft, tremulous lips, on which a faint smile would
so often play, and those great, wide eyes of blue that now looked purple
in the lamp-light. And then, gradually, I saw, as I watched, an
expression I had never seen there before; the wavering suggestion of the
smile left the lips and they fell apart, loose and bloodless, with a
glimpse of the missing front tooth. It was an expression that lasted but
the fraction of a second, but it stamped her whole countenance with
something sinister.

Then Henrietta lifted the eggs, carried the coffee-pot across to the
table, which was none other than the board-capped barrel, and went back
for the lamp. All these things she insisted upon doing herself, just as
she had stubbornly refused to allow me to help with the cooking of the
supper.

Setting the lamp down upon the improvised table, she threw open one of
the shutters to let in a breath of fresh air, and as she did so the room
was filled with the roar and dust of the elevated train which passed so
close to our wi