the opening night of the Drawing
Academy, wearing a delicate lace cap, and a new silk gown of Valentine's
choosing, made full enough to hide the emaciation of her figure. Her
husband's love, faithful through all affliction and change to the
girlish image of its first worship, still affectionately exacted from
her as much attention to the graces and luxuries of dress as she might
have bestowed on them of her own accord, in the best and gayest days
of youth and health. She had never looked happier and better in any
new gown than in that, which Mr. Blyth had insisted on giving her, to
commemorate the establishment of the domestic drawing school in her own
room.

Seven o'clock had been fixed as the hour at which the business of
the academy was to begin. Always punctual, wherever his professional
engagements were concerned, Valentine put the finishing touch to his
preparations as the clock struck; and perching himself gaily on a corner
of Mrs. Blyth's couch, surveyed his drawing-boards, his lamps, and the
plaster cast set up for his pupils to draw from, with bland artistic
triumph.

"Now, Lavvie," he said, "before Zack comes and confuses me, I'll just
check off all the drawing things one after another, to make sure that
nothing's left down stairs in the studio, which ought to be up here."

As her husband said these words, Mrs. Blyth touched Madonna gently
on the shoulder. For some little time the girl had been sitting
thoughtfully, with her head bent down, her cheek resting on her hand,
and a bright smile just parting her lips very prettily. The affliction
which separated her from the worlds of hearing and speech--which set her
apart among her fellow-creatures, a solitary living being in a sphere of
death-silence that others might approach, but might never enter--gave
a touching significance to the deep, meditative stillness that often
passed over her suddenly, even in the society of her adopted parents,
and of friends who were all talking around her. Sometimes, the thoughts
by which she was thus absorbed--thoughts only indicated to others by
the shadow of their mysterious presence, moving in the expression that
passed over her face--held her long under their influence: sometimes,
they seemed to die away in her mind almost as suddenly as they had
arisen to life in it. It was one of Valentine's many eccentric fancies
that she was not meditating only, at such times as these, but that, deaf
and dumb as she was with the crea