glories of both seasons, and seemed some
sweet, dewy spring, wrapped in the snows and frozen in the icy garb of
winter.

He had expected to meet a middle-aged person, habited in widow's
weeds, and meek from the severe scourging of a recent and terrible
bereavement; but that anomalous white face and proud, queenly form
were unlike all other flesh that his keen eyes had hitherto scanned;
and he regarded her as curiously as he would have examined some
abnormal-looking specimen of nerves and muscles laid upon the marble
slab of a dissecting-table.

Recollecting suddenly that, if he did not present himself, the wagon
would arrive before he had accomplished the object of his visit, he
drew a card from his pocket, and, stepping over the low sill of the
oriel window, advanced to the arch.

The mistress of the house sat with her back turned towards him, and
was apparently absorbed in putting purple shadows into the folds of a
mantle that hung from the shoulders of a kneeling figure on the
canvas.

Face-downward on an ottoman near, lay a beautiful copy of Owen
Meredith's poems; and, after a few seconds, she paused, brush in hand,
and, taking up the book, slowly read aloud--glancing, as she did so,
from page to picture,--

... "'Then I could perceive
A glory pouring through an open door,
And in the light five women. I believe
They wore white vestments, all of them. They were
Quite calm; and each still face unearthly fair,
Unearthly quiet. So like statues all,
Waiting they stood without that lighted hall;
And in their hands, like a blue star, they held
Each one a silver lamp.'"

Standing immediately behind her, Dr. Grey saw that she had seized the
weird "_Vision of Virgins_," and was putting into pigment that solemn
phantasm of the poet's imagination where five radiant women were
passing to their reward,--and five wailing over flickering, dying
lamps, were huddled helplessly and hopelessly under a black and
starless midnight sky. Although unfinished, there was marvellous power
in the picture, and the sickly gleam from the expiring wicks made the
surrounding gloom more supernatural, like the deep shadows skulking
behind the lurid glare in some old Flemish painting.

He saw also that she had followed the general outline of the poem; but
one of the faces was so supreme in its mute anguish that he thought of
Reni's "Cenci," and of a wan "Alcestis," and a desperate "Cassandra,"
he had seen at