is open mouth.

The expression of this face struck me all at once as terrible. It
regarded me with a look of silent understanding, as though I were a
companion in suffering, and would have to lie there when its torments
had at last come to an end. It was impossible to remove my eyes from the
picture; it seemed to become alive, now coming quite near, now going far
away into a darkness that my own dizzy head created.

It was as though in this picture the curtain was drawn aside from a part
of my own soul's secret history, and it was only by an effort of will,
called forth by a fear of becoming too far absorbed into my own fancy,
that I succeeded in tearing myself away from it.

When I turned, there stood in the light that fell from the window near
the front pew, the lady with the rose. She wore an expression of
infinite sadness, as though she knew well the connection between me and
the picture, and as if the briar-spray in her hand were only a miniature
of the thorn-bush in which yonder martyr lay.

In the lonely stillness of the church a panic came over me, an
inexpressible terror of unseen powers, and I fled precipitately.

When I got outside, I discovered that I had lost Susanna's blue cross.
It could only be in the church on the step where I had been sitting. At
that moment, while my heart was still throbbing with terror, I would not
have gone back again into the church for anything in the world--except
Susanna's blue cross. I found it, when I carefully searched the floor
where I had been sitting.

The second time during these years that my nervous system gave evidence
of its unsoundness was late in the autumn, a month or two before I was
to go home.

A peasant, who had gone in to see the minister, had fastened his horse,
which was wall-eyed, to the churchyard wall. I began to look at it; and
the recollection of its dead, expressionless glance followed me for the
rest of the day. It seemed to me as if its eyes, instead of looking out,
looked inwards into a world invisible to me, and as if it would be
quite natural if it forgot to obey the reins, and left the ordinary
highway for the road to Hades, along which the dead are travelling.

With this in my mind, I sat that afternoon in the parsonage where people
were talking of all kinds of things, and there suddenly appeared before
me a home face, pale and with a strained look, and soon after I could
see that the man to whom it belonged was striving desperately to